On Tuesday, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), said that two indigenous vaccine candidates are soon going to enter the human trials in this month with above 1,000 volunteers to be registered for the progression on a fast-track basis. The COVID-19 cases in India has been rapidly increasing and reached to 933,522.

Dr Balram Bhargava, director general, ICMR, said that two indigenous Indian vaccine candidates have gone through successful toxicity studies in mice, rats and rabbits and the toxicity data is shared with Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI). Clearance to start human trials early this month has been received. Bharat Biotech and Serum Institute of India are the companies.

Bhargava said that around 1,000 human volunteers have participated in clinical trials for the two vaccine candidates and preclinical experiments. The participants are also for these and other vaccines whose clinical trials will be being done at the National Institute of Virology, Pune.

The Union health ministry had said that it has also started a counselling exercise to collect information from treating doctors on complications that are being faced by recovered patients from COVID-19, based on that few guidelines might also be issued in the coming days.

The number of recovered people in India from COVID-19 is around 1.8 times the number of active cases. In several states, the number of everyday discharges from hospitals is more than daily admissions.

Rajesh Bhushan, officer on special duty, in the health ministry, said that COVID-19 cases have an unequal distribution in India. Almost 86% of total active COVID-19 cases are restricted to only 10 states, whereas 50% of active cases are seen in two states. This shows that the spread of COVID-19 is not happening uniformly across the whole country.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has emerged with a document highlighting the need for comprehensive surveillance and testing of suspect COVID-19 cases. Testing is essential in containing the spread and testing 140 people per day per 1 million population would be comprehensive.

Bhushan said that almost 22 states are performing more than 140 COVID-19 tests per day per million. Centre is also instructing states and Union territories to escalate their testing to proceed towards the guidelines specified by the WHO. There were 101 COVID-19 RT-PCR testing labs in mid-March, whereas now there are 1,206 RT-PCR testing labs and 280 rapid antigen testing centres.

The government has also directed a sero survey to find the presence of coronavirus among people in containment zones. The ICMR said that stratification of data collected for the sero survey in Delhi and its analysis is being performed. 22,800 blood samples were collected for this sero survey till 5th July. The health ministry said that the national COVID-19 fatality rate is 2.6% and it is declining.

Bhushan said that deaths per 1 million population in India is the lowest in the world, whereas in few countries it is 35 times higher. In spite of being the 2nd most populous country of the world, the day-to-day growth rate of fresh COVID-19 cases in India is declining.

Source: live mint