Daily Covid-19 vaccinations in India once again crossed the 55-lakh mark after a gap of a week, with States and Union Territories administering over 55 lakh vaccine shots till Saturday evening. The vaccination drive has picked up pace once again at a time when the daily Covid-19 cases have begun to fall significantly.

Till Saturday morning, India reported 44,111 new corona cases, nearly 14,000 lower than 57,477 recoveries registered in the last 24 hours.

New vaccine policy

India revised its Covid vaccine procurement policy on June 21 with the Centre taking up the responsibility of procuring for the States as well. On June 21, the country recorded the highest 86.16 lakh vaccinations, but the numbers have been falling gradually since then.On Friday, for instance, less than 44 lakh beneficiaries were inoculated.

The vaccination picked up pace once again on Saturday, with States like Maharashtra and Rajasthan inoculationg a record 7,09,898 and 6,71,560 beneficiaries, respectively. Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Karnataka too administered more than 4 lakh vaccine doses each in a single day till 6:00 pm, as per data available on the CoWIN dashboard.

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India reported 44,111 new Covid cases on Saturday with 738 deaths in the last 24 hours till Saturday morning. Kerala reported the highest number of Covid cases at 11,465, even though it came down slightly as compared to the previous day’s 12,868 infections.

Kerala recorded 146 Covid deaths, second only to Maharashtra which recorded the maximum number of daily fatalities at 156 and infections at 8,753. Similarly, Tamil Nadu recorded 4,230 cases with 97 daily deaths, whereas Odisha registered 3,222 cases with 46 mortalities in the last 24 hours.

India’s cumulative cases stood at 3,05,02,362 of which total recoveries were at 2,96,05,779 with a total of 57,477 recoveries registered in the last 24 hours till 8:00 AM.

India’s weekly positivity rate came down to 2.50 per cent while the daily positivity rate stood at 2.35 per cent. Also, India conducted 18,76,036 tests during the previous day aggregating to 41.64 crore tests so far, as per the data by the Indian Council of Medical Research.