BENGALURU: As India shattered all its daily vaccination records on Friday with about 2.28 crore jabs, Karnataka led the charge with 28.4 lakh doses of Covid vaccine doses administered, emerging as the state with the highest number of vaccinations in the mega-vaccination mela, touted as “a gift to PM Narendra Modi” on his 71st birthday.
Karnataka was ahead of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, which stood in the second and third places, respectively.
Led by Bengaluru Urban, which achieved 143% of the targeted 50,000 vaccinations, 13 districts across Karnataka were able to achieve over 100 per cent of their targets set for the day. Overall, Karnataka was able to achieve 92 per cent of targeted 31,75,000 vaccines with 29,09,163 doses administered. It also crossed five crore total doses in the process on Friday.
The vaccination drive was conducted in over 12,000 Covid vaccination across the State. The top districts are BBMP area (3.98 lakh doses), Belagavi (2.39 lakh doses), Dakshina Kannada (1.33 lakh), Ballari (1.33 lakh), Tumakuru (1.24 lakh) and Mandya (1.15 lakh).
11 dists achieve over 100% of target
Apa rt from Bengaluru Urban, districts of Shivamogga, Dharwad, Ramanagara, Hassan, Davanagere, Chikkaballapur, Chikkamagaluru, Tumakuru, Haveri and Bagalkot achieved more than 100 per cent of their targets. With Friday’s performance, the total doses administered in the State in September have gone up to 87 lakh.
“We are confident of crossing the target of 1.5 crore we have set ourselves for September. It is a phenomenal effort by Karnataka to administer more doses today (Friday) than Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, which have bigger populations,” said Dr K Sudhakar, Minister for Health & Family Welfare and Medical Education. However, on a day that China — the only other country in the world more populous than India — reported a total vaccination coverage of over 1 billion (100 crore), India’s total number of vaccinations stood at 772.42 million (77,24,25,744) so far.
Experts, while lauding the effort, said it needs to be sustained to ensure that the entire population is vaccinated by December-end. Prof Sashikumar Ganesan, Chairman, Department of Computational and Data Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, said Friday’s coverage of over two crore vaccinations is phenomenal, “and shows the capacity of our healthcare system. If we continue with this rate, we could avoid the third wave. Nevertheless, it is not clear to me why we waited this long when we had such capabilities!”