Coronavirus India LIVE updates: Health workers in Mobile COVID Testing Van take swab samples in New Ashok Nagar in New Delhi (Express photo/Abhinav Saha)
Coronavirus India News Live Updates: With India reporting 47,704 Covid-19 cases and 654 deaths in the last 24 hours, the total number of infections on Tuesday rose to 14,83,157 including 33,425 casualties, 4,96,988 active cases, and 9,52,744 recoveries. The government has conducted over 10 lakh Covid-19 tests in the past two days, according to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi Monday launched “high throughput” testing facilities in Noida, Mumbai and Kolkata and said India was in a much better position than other countries in fight against the pandemic.
The government has at least five sites ready across four states for late-stage human clinical trials expected by the end of this year for several Covid-19 vaccine candidates, including those developed by the University of Oxford, Zydus Cadila and Bharat Biotech. An additional six sites are being set up to ensure ready availability of healthy participants. Several other firms in the country are working on Covid-19 vaccines. Of these, Bharat Biotech and Zydus Cadila are currently conducting phase I/II trials. Other firms like Gennova Biopharmaceuticals intend to begin phase I trials by October.
Also, human clinical trials of Covid-19 vaccine ‘Covaxin’ commenced at Institute of Medical Sciences and SUM hospital in Bhubaneswar, PTI reported. The Post-Graduate Institute (PGI) of Medical Sciences, Rohtak, AIIMS Delhi and Patna are among the 12 sites that have already started human trials.
Globally, 16,426,919 people have been infected with the virus, 653,353 have lost their lives and 9,531,059 have recovered.
Healthcare staff conducting screening and swab collection for Covid-19 test at an apartment complex in Dadar west
With India reporting 47,704 Covid-19 cases and 654 deaths in the last 24 hours, the total number of infections on Tuesday rose to 14,83,157 including 33,425 casualties, 4,96,988 active cases, and 9,52,744 recoveries. The government has conducted over 10 lakh Covid-19 tests in the past two days, according to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.
Pune-based Gennova Biopharmaceuticals is planning to start testing its candidate vaccine on human beings by October. Right now it is carrying out pre-clinical trials. Two Indian candidates have just begun phase-I clinical trials earlier this month. One of them is being developed by Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech, in collaboration with Pune-based National Institute of Virology, which is part of the network of laboratories of the Indian Council of Medical Research. The other one is being developed by Ahmedabad-based Zydus Cadila.
Unlike the other two, Gennova is trying an mRNA vaccine, which is just one of the several ways in which vaccines trigger immune response in human beings against a virus. It involves injecting a messenger RNA that is coded to tell the cells to recreate a crucial part of the virus that the body needs to build immunity against.
As many of you might already be aware, more than 160 vaccines for novel Coronavirus, also known as SARS-CoV2, are currently being developed across the world. According to latest information from World Health Organisation, 25 candidate vaccines are in one of the three stages of human trials. These include the two being developed by Indian companies, Zydus and Bharat Biotech. As of today, another 139 are in pre-clinical evaluation, meaning that they are still being tried out on animals.
Some of these have excited the scientific world more than the others, for the promise that they have shown so far. The one being developed by US-based Moderna Therapeutics was the earliest mover, its phase-I human trials having started as early as middle of March. It has now completed phase-I and phase-II trials and, on Monday, entered phase-III trials, for which 30,000 volunteers have been roped in. Not all of them would be administered the vaccine. In phase-III trials, some of the volunteers are injected with the vaccine while the others are given a dummy. The volunteers do not know. They go about their normal lives, and after a few weeks, they are checked to see if they have been infected.
Irrespective of how the vaccine candidates developed by Indian companies eventually perform, India would remain a central player, both as one of the biggest manufacturers of vaccines in the world, and also one of the biggest markets. As pointed out by the Dr Balram Bhargava, director general of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the other day, India controls nearly 60 per cent of the global supply of all kinds of vaccines.
Besides, as the second-most populous country in the world, India also happens to be one of the biggest markets for vaccines.
Dear Readers,
As part of our continuing efforts to make sense of this life-altering pandemic, we are, beginning today, starting this new column to keep you informed about all the latest on the Covid vaccine front. This column will track laboratory research to field trials, publications and regulatory approvals, and also the logistical exercises of production and distribution of these vaccines. All, in an explanatory fashion that you, as an Express reader, are now familiar with, and have come to expect from us. A lot of these activities will happen in India as well. Two vaccine candidates in India are currently being tested on humans, and more are in the pipeline. India is also key to the global vaccine supply chain. Today we explain why that’s so — and bring you the latest vaccine updates from the field.
BE IT the battlefields of Yemen or the trap he fell into in India, Muhammad Gibran Saleh Gibran has only one name for those responsible: “Bad men”. One of them fired the bullet that shattered a part of his face two years ago, and two others “ran away” with his passport and money in Mumbai.
The 26-year-old is among several soldiers who were flown over in January for specialised treatment by Yemen’s exiled government after they were injured in the civil war that erupted in 2015 between a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Read More
Locating the right volunteers — who have not been infected with Covid-19 earlier, are not asymptomatic and are healthy — has been a problem in conducting clinical trials.
The government has at least five sites ready across four states for late-stage human clinical trials expected by the end of this year for several Covid-19 vaccine candidates, including those developed by the University of Oxford, Zydus Cadila and Bharat Biotech. An additional six sites are being set up to ensure ready availability of healthy participants.
Speaking to The Indian Express, Department of Biotechnology Secretary Dr Renu Swarup said that with trial sites ready, companies would have a handy and large database of volunteers, “a couple of thousands” at each site, as well as trained personnel, at a time when efforts are being fast-tracked to find a vaccine against rising cases.
IndiGo on Monday said it is implementing “deeper” pay cuts of up to 35 per cent for its senior employees in order to reduce its cash outflow amid the coronavirus pandemic. From May onwards, IndiGo had implemented pay cuts of up to 25 per cent for its senior employees. The “deeper” pay cuts came after the airline’s announcement on July 20 that it would lay off 10 per cent of its workforce due to the economic crisis caused by the pandemic.
In an e-mail on Monday, IndiGo CEO Ronojoy Dutta told employees, “I will increase my personal pay cut percentage to 35 per cent. I am asking all senior vice presidents and above to take a 30 per cent pay cut, all pilots will see their pay cut percentages increased to 28 per cent, all vice presidents will take a 25 per cent pay cut and associate vice presidents will take a 15 per cent pay cut.” These increased pay cuts will come into effect from September 1, he added. Read more
On Sunday, Amitabha Bhowmik witnessed his 76-year-old father die gasping for breath on a wheelchair at Tripurasundari District Hospital, waiting for oxygen support. Shyamalendu Bhowmik, who had been running a temperature for a few days, had tested positive for Covid-19 just minutes before.
Shyamalendu, who used to frequent hospitals for the treatment of kidney and cardiac problems, had developed a temperature a few days back. The family continued medication at home for a couple of days till the patient started experiencing serious respiratory problems. Amitabha took his fatter to the district hospital on Sunday morning, where the two underwent mandatory rapid antigen tests.
After test results came positive for both, the authorities allegedly kept the two waiting on a wheelchair for over an hour while arranging for an oxygen cylinder and the ambulance to take them to Agartala. By then, Shyamalendu had died on the wheelchair.
Amitabha, now admitted at a Covid Care Centre in Chandrapur area of Gomati district, claimed his father died because of the utter negligence of the hospital. “We took him to the hospital just for oxygen support this time, around 10:30 in the morning since he was having trouble breathing. They kept us waiting for over an hour on a wheelchair and he died,” alleged Bhowmik, who claims both of them did not have Covid-19 and the reports were false. Read more
Moderna Inc said on Monday it had started a late-stage trial to test the effectiveness of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate, the first such study under the Trump administration’s program to speed development of measures against the novel coronavirus.
News of the study, which will test the response to the vaccine in 30,000 adults who do not have the respiratory illness, pushed shares in Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Moderna up more than 8% before the bell.
The federal government is supporting Moderna’s vaccine project with its Operation Warp Speed program. Moderna has received nearly $1 billion from the U.S. government, which has chosen it as one of the first to enter large-scale human trials. Read more
Uttar Pradesh's Gautam Buddh Nagar recorded 44 fresh COVID-19 cases on Monday as the number of active cases in the district plummeted below 700-mark, official data showed. A total of 125 patients were discharged after treatment on Monday, it said. So far, 4,792 people have tested positive for the infection in the district while the number of active cases came down to 692 from 773 on Sunday, according to the data released by the UP Health Department for a 24-hour period. The district, adjoining Delhi, has so far recorded 40 deaths linked to COVID-19, with a mortality rate of 0.83 per cent among positive patients, it showed. (PTI)
Jailed RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav, currently undergoing treatment at a Ranchi hospital for multiple ailments, has tested negative for COVID-19, a senior doctor at the facility said on Monday. Three of his attendants, however, have been diagnosed with the disease, he said. The report of his swab sample test that came late on Sunday showed that Prasad did not contract the infection, Dr Umesh Prasad, who is attending to the ailing RJD supremo at Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS), told PTI. His samples, along with those of his attendants, were sent for examination on Saturday as a precautionary measure. The state-run RIMS is one of the designated Covid-19 hospitals in the Jharkhand capital.
Reporting 5000 cases daily for the fifth consecutive day, the total tally of the novel coronavirus cases in Karnataka crossed the one-lakh mark on Monday. While the state reported 5,324 new cases in the last 24 hours, 1,470 of those were from Bengaluru alone. The first case of COVID was confirmed in Bengaluru on March 8.
Human clinical trials of Covid-19 vaccine 'Covaxin' commenced at Institute of Medical Sciences and SUM hospital in Bhubaneswar, PTI reported. The Post-Graduate Institute (PGI) of Medical Sciences, Rohtak, AIIMS Delhi and Patna are among the 12 sites that have already started human trials. Rohtak PGIMS, which had commenced the first part of Phase-1 trials of Covaxin on July 17 on 50 volunteers, reported “encouraging” results, according to ANI. READ FULL STORY HERE
In a bid to further ramp up Covid-19 testing capacity, Prime Minister Narendra Modi Monday launched “high throughput” testing facilities in Noida, Mumbai and Kolkata and said India was in a much better position than other countries in fight against the pandemic. Prime Minister Modi said the labs would not only be restricted to Covid-19 testing but would be expanded for testing of other diseases like Hepatitis B & C, HIV, and Dengue in the future.
“Today, there are more than 11,000 COVID-19 facilities and more than 11 lakh isolation beds in the country. We also have nearly 1,300 testing labs in the country and more than 5 lakh tests are being conducted daily,” Modi said during the launch. “Due to right decisions taken at right time, India is in much better position than other countries in fight. The new testing facilities will give West Bengal, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh more strength to fight Covid-19,” PM Modi further said.
Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar on Monday asked officials to set up three "jumbo" COVID-19 treatment facilities in Pune amid spike in cases. During a visit to review the COVID-19 situation here, Pawar also said there were complaints of overcharging against some private hospitals, adding these bills will be examined by independent accountants. He asked district and civic officials to ramp up health infrastructure in and around Pune keeping in mind the August-end scenario. Pune officials had said an 800-bed mega facility would be set up to treat coronavirus positive patients. (PTI)
Bollywood actor Aishwarya Rai and daughter Aaradhya Bachchan have been discharged from Mumbai’s Nanavati Hospital after testing negative for coronavirus. Abhishek Bachchan took to Twitter to share the news. He tweeted, “Thank you all for your continued prayers and good wishes. Indebted forever. 🙏🏽 Aishwarya and Aaradhya have thankfully tested negative and have been discharged from the hospital. They will now be at home. My father and I remain in hospital under the care of the medical staff.”
Abhishek Bachchan also said that he and his father Amitabh Bachchan are still recovering from the disease in Nanavati Hospital. Sources said the father-son duo are likely to be discharged this week.
While Amitabh and Abhishek had tested positive for COVID-19 on July 11, Aishwarya and Aaradhya had tested positive for coronavirus a day later. While Aishwarya and Aaradhya were initially advised home quarantine, they had to be admitted to Nanavati Hospital on July 17. Read more
The Vadodara administration has decided to set up a COVID care facility at the Central Jail this week. The move comes after several inmates of the jail tested positive for the infection. The facility, which will be set up at the Health Centre of the jail, will have 80 beds as of now. OSD Vinod Rao, who visited the jail premises on Monday, confirmed that civic-run SSG hospital will oversee the facility.
The government on Monday said that the country's fatality rate due to the novel coronavirus infection has been progressively falling and currently stands at 2.28 per cent which is among the lowest in the world. "With effective containment strategy, aggressive testing and standardised clinical management protocols based on holistic standard of care approach, the case fatality rate has significantly dipped," the Health Ministry said in a statement. The case fatality rate is progressively falling and currently is at 2.28 per cent, it said, adding that India has one of the lowest fatality rates in the world.
An FIR has been registered against 26 people in Bihar for violating social distancing norms while protesting against cremation of COVID-19 victims at Bansghat crematorium here. The people who took out a procession on Sunday had also not taken permission from the authorities concerned, a release from the district administration said. The group failed to produce valid documents when asked to do so by Magistrate Chandan Prasad, who is deputed at Bansghat. Crowding is illegal during lockdown which in force in the state from July 16-31. The FIR has been lodged against the persons, including 20 unnamed ones, under various sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and the Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897 at Buddha Colony police station of the capital city. (PTI)