India on Saturday recorded over 89,000 new Covid-19 cases with the epidemic’s second wave poised to breach the earlier peak of 97,894 cases and at least five states reporting more cases than they had last year.
Amid the sharp rise in daily counts, the country’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign has moved slower than expected with a conspicuous low participation from private hospitals and about 10 million people immunised from the target of around 350 million.
In Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Punjab, the counts of daily new cases have exceeded the peaks last year. Maharashtra, for instance, on Saturday recorded over 47,000 new cases compared with its peak count of about 25,000 last September. Gujarat reported 2,600 cases, nearly 1,000 higher than its previous peak count.
“We’re seeing the epidemic’s full blast — the speed of the current growth suggests the peak counts this time will cross the earlier peak within days,” said T. Sundaraman, a community medicine specialist and former director of the National Health Systems Resource Centre.
Health officials have attributed the growing epidemic to public laxity in wearing masks and avoiding crowds and inadequate containment and public health measures by local state health authorities, but some medical researchers suspect it may also be driven by fast-spreading infectious variants.
The 89,129 new cases on Saturday pushed India’s count of Covid patients to over 658,000. Maharashtra has shown a nine-fold increase in the number of active cases over the past two months — from 42,000 on February 3 to over 3,91,000 on Saturday.
Health officials are unhappy over what one senior adviser to the Centre described as a “lukewarm” response from the private sector to the vaccination campaign that is intended to protect as many people as possible through two doses of vaccines.
But until Saturday, nearly 80 days since vaccination began, only about 10 million people have received two doses of the vaccines. The campaign is now open to all people above 45 years, around 350 million people.
“We had around 45,000 government hospitals and around 5,500 private hospitals participating in the campaign today,” a senior medical adviser to the vaccination campaign told The Telegraph. “We had expected over 20,000 private hospitals to join the campaign.”
However, the 50,000-plus centres on Saturday administered a record 7 million doses, which, the adviser said, is encouraging. “If such a pace is sustained, we should be able to inoculate over 200 million people within a month,” the adviser said.
Health officials have asserted there is no shortage of vaccine supplies in India. “Our understanding is that the Serum Institute of India can produce between 70 million and 100 million doses of Covishield a month while Bharat Biotech can deliver around 10 million,” an official said.
The Centre had earlier this year, amid a strong demand from sections of the private hospital industry, opened vaccinations anytime of the day in the private sector. “They need to be asked why they are not coming forward now,” the adviser said.