Covid vaccination: Near total 1-shot cover in Himachal; UP, Bengal at bottom
Seven and a half months into the national vaccination drive, India has got more than half its adult population inoculated with at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine.
In the two small states of Sikkim and Himachal Pradesh, and in the Union Territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, almost every eligible person has received at least one dose of the vaccine, data show.
As on September 1, nearly 51 crore people — which is 54 per cent of the estimated 93.8 crore people above the age of 18 years in India — had received at least one dose of the vaccine. Over 15.32 crore of these individuals have received their second dose as well.
Besides Himachal and Sikkim, Uttarakhand, Kerala, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh too have done well; over 70 per cent of their adult population have been administered at least one dose (see box).
In these states, over a quarter of the eligible population have been inoculated with the second dose as well.
In every state across the country, at least 40 per cent of people have received at least one vaccine dose. The lowest coverage is in West Bengal, where about 41 per cent have been immunised with a single shot. Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Tamil Nadu have done better than West Bengal, but are still well short of the share of vaccinated people nationally. In at least eight big states, less than 50 per cent of the adult population have been vaccinated.
Over 66 crore vaccine doses have been administered until now, of which Covishield — the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University, and manufactured in India under licence by Pune-based Serum Institute in India — accounts for more than 87 per cent.
Nearly 12 per cent of all doses have been that of Covaxin of Bharat Biotech; the remaining 1 per cent have been those of the Russian Sputnik V.