Delhi’s daily count of fresh Covid cases drops to four-month low

The number of fresh Covid-19 cases in Delhi came down to a four-month low of 758 on Friday, while the number of deaths due to the disease was put at 30.

The capital’s positivity rate, which shows the percentage of positive cases out of the total number tested, fell to 0.88 per cent. This indicates the pandemic appears to be abating in Delhi after having surged in the festive season last month.

The positive cases were from 85,749 tests in the last 24 hours, the data showed. This is 4,171 less than the previous test mark of 89,920 from which a total of 1,063 positive cases were reported on Thursday.

Around 5.1 million people in Delhi will be in line for the first pahse of the vaccination. Delhi’s current storage capacity was for 7.4 million doses which would be expanded to 11.5 million in a week, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal said.

Meanwhile at the national level, the government is gearing up for rolling out the Covid-19 vaccine across the country and a dry run has been planned in four states to start from next week. The training of vaccine administrators, who will play an important role in the process, has already been taken up across various states.

The two-day dry run activity will be held on December 28 and 29 in Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Gujarat and Punjab. This dry run will include activities from the necessary data entries in Co-WIN IT platform to vaccine receipt and allocation to deployment of team members, mock drill of session sites with test beneficiaries. This will also include testing for cold storage and transportation arrangements for Covid-19 vaccine, management of crowds at the session sites with proper physical distancing.

As many as 2,360 participants have already been trained during national level training of trainers which comprised state immunization officers, cold chain officers and development partners. The state level trainings have been completed in all States/UTs with participation of more than 7000 district level trainees, except Lakshadweep which will conduct it on December 29.

The training includes all operational aspects like organization of vaccination sessions, use of Co-WIN IT platform for management of the entire vaccination process, deployment of HR cold chain preparedness, management of adverse events, communications and inter-sectoral coordination, biomedical waste management and infection prevention protocols..