Maharashtra is facing shortage of Covaxin doses, says state Health Minister Rajesh Tope

Mumbai: Amid rise in COVID-19 cases and commencement of vaccination drive for precaution dose for senior citizens, frontline workers and doctors, Maharashtra is currently facing shortage of Covaxin-COVID-19 vaccine, state Health Minister Rajesh Tope said on Wednesday.

"There is a shortage of Covaxin in Maharashtra. We're getting calls from district authorities in this regard. In the VC with Union health minister, we demanded 50 lakh doses of Covishield and 40 lakh doses of Covaxin to ramp up vaccination", Tope told ANI.

Maharashtra on Wednesday inoculated 14,08,96,908 people against the COVID-19 virus.

Meanwhile, Maharashtra on Wednesday, January 12, recorded 46,723 fresh COVID-19 cases, taking the number of active cases to 2,40,122. Besides, 32 COVID-19 deaths were reported in the day, taking the number of total fatalities to 1,41,701.

28,041 patients were discharged in the day, taking the tally to 66,49,111. The recovery rate in the state is 94.52%. The case fatality rate in the state is 2.01%.

Meanwhile, 86 new cases of the Omicron variant of coronavirus were detected in Maharashtra on Wednesday. With this, the total number of Omicron infected patients in the state are 1367. Out of these, 734 cases have been discharged following a negative RT-PCR test.

Maharashtra with active COVID-19 cases of 2,06,046 and weekly positivity rate of 21.39% has emerged as the ‘’state of concern’’. The state cabinet chaired by Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray admitted that it was an alarming situation and decided to focus on tracking, tracing, testing and vaccination and above all strict implementation of curbs introduced to control crowding.