How We Got The World's First DNA-Based Vaccine

Covid infections are plateauing out and vaccine coverage is increasing. But, the festive season brings with it renewed fears of faster transmissions and emergence of new variants. The next three months will be critical, warn experts

- Pooja Biraia Jaiswal

On May 6, India reported more than four lakh new Covid-19 cases. Exactly four months later, on October 6, the number had fallen to 18,000—the lowest in the previous six months, according to the Union government. The numbers have remained low for the past three months as well, never crossing 50,000 a day.

Four months ago, there were 37 lakh active Covid-19 cases in the country. Now the figure is below 2.5 lakh, less than 1 per cent of the total number of cases reported so far. India’s current test positivity rate is 2.3 per cent, below WHO’s desirable benchmark of 5 per cent. The R-value—a good indicator of the virus’s ability to spread, since the value signifies the number of people that one infected person will pass on a virus to, on an average—is well below the red mark. It has come down to 0.92, from 1.31 in the first few days of May.

The severity of infections and hospitalisations across the country, especially in cities like Delhi and Mumbai that had previously reported a high number of cases, have also come down. In Mumbai, less than 2,000 of 19,189 Covid beds were occupied on October 5. Only 8 per cent of oxygen beds in the city are in use, while there are no containment zones in the slums and chawls that had earlier struggled to contain new infections. Likewise in Kerala—which had received early plaudits for its exceptional pandemic control measures but began reporting the highest number of Covid cases in August—most new infections had symptoms that were less severe.