India's nationwide COVID-19 vaccination drive now second-largest in the world

The average number of COVID-19 vaccine doses administered daily was 1.26 million last week. With such figures, India's COVID-19 vaccination drive has become the second-largest inoculation programme in the world. This is both in terms of total jabs administered and the number of doses being administered daily. Now, India is only behind the United States which is administering 2.5 million COVID-19 doses daily. India's recent gains have indicated that the vaccination drive has been picking up pace in the last few weeks.

India's daily dose count has tripled in the last 20 days, it was around 0.4 million for the week ending on February 22, this number increased to 1.26 million last week, according to The Hindustan Times. However, some experts believe that the vaccination process needs to be scaled even further up in order to break the transmission cycle. Indian Institute of Public Health, Head of Epidemiology, Dr Giridhara R Babu told the daily, "Although it is heartening to see an increase in pace, It is sort of an under accomplishment to go at this rate as India has the capacity to cover 7 to 10 million per day".

So far in the nationwide COVID-19 vaccination drive, 29.9 million doses have been administered to beneficiaries in India. While the UK had administered 25.87 million doses to 24.19 million people still Saturday night, according to data provided by the UK government.

Till Sunday, the US had administered 107 million COVID-19 doses making it the country with the world's largest inoculation drive ahead of India and the UK. In the US, 69.78 million people have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 jab so far, according to data provided by the Centre for Disease Control.

However, while India is soaring to new heights on the inoculation front, the number of COVID-19 cases registered daily have been spiking for the past few weeks. On Sunday, the number of daily fresh cases crossed the 26,00-mark for the first time since December 19 i.e 85 days ago.

On March 14, 26,173 fresh COVID-19 cases were recorded. These take the country's total active COVID-19 case count to 2,19,262, according to the Union Health Ministry. Hundred and eighteen people succumbed to the deadly virus on Sunday taking India's total death count to 1,58,725.

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