Nearly 34.59 per cent of the city’s population is yet to take their first Covid-19 vaccine dose and only 16.63 per cent are fully vaccinated till date. The BMC had set a target of vaccinating the entire population by November or December. However, in order to achieve this target, the BMC will have to ramp up its vaccination drive.

Civic officials claim they have been facing shortage of doses since the vaccination drive began in January. Due to this, the drives had to be cancelled or suspended many times. This month too, the drive was suspended at least four to five times. So now, the civic body cannot commit the actual timeframe of completing the vaccination drive for the entire population.

Currently, the population in Mumbai is nearly 1.30 crore. According to latest BMC figures, so far, 85,02,077 beneficiaries have been vaccinated, of which 63,40,138 have received their first dose, while 21,61,939 are fully vaccinated. However, 44,97,923 are still to administer the first dose, which means nearly 34.59 per cent. Additional municipal commissioner, Suresh Kakani said they have the capacity to vaccinate 1,50,000 citizens per day, but this depends on the availability of vaccines. So far, they have been administering between 40,000 and 60,000 shots daily. Moreover, if there was constant supply of vaccine from the Centre, the civic body would have fully vaccinated half of the city’s population.

“We are trying our best to vaccinate everyone at the earliest. This month we have vaccinated more than two lakh people in a single-day and on two occasions over one lakh beneficiaries were vaccinated. We hope we receive adequate stock soon,” Kakani said.

Senior civic officials said depending on the current amount of vaccines, they cannot set a deadline of when the entire population will be vaccinated. The November deadline seems to be impossible as more than 30 per cent are yet to receive the first dose. “If we go by simple calculations, the civic body will take more than six to seven months to vaccinate the entire population. We need to increase the speed of drives. However, epidemiologist claim over 5 million citizens are probably exposed to Covid-19. As we have around 0.7 million Covid cases, when we multiply their contacts, the number comes to 3.5 million,” he said.

A member of the state government’s Covid-19 task force, Dr Rahul Pandit said, “It is a logical calculation that Mumbai should be able to vaccinate its remaining citizens by the end of the year or a little later. However, we are not vaccinating enough people. Recently, vaccine numbers have gone up comparatively, but we need to increase the pace, especially with the city opening up.”