Maharashtra Health Minister Rajesh Tope on Tuesday met Union Health Minister Dr. Harsh Vardhan and Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan, and requested them to provide 20 lakh COVID-19 vaccine doses to the state every week.
"Today, I met Health Minister Dr. Harsh Vardhan and Health Secretary and submitted a letter requesting that 20 lakh vaccine doses be provided to Maharashtra every week as we aim to vaccinate 3 lakh people each day," Tope said.
Tope's request comes after the Centre said that the second COVID-19 wave has already begun in Maharashtra.
Earlier in the day, Rajesh Bhushan wrote to Maharashtra Chief Secretary after the Central team's visit last week and observed that the state is undergoing the second wave of COVID-19 while urging for focus on containment strategies.
"Maharashtra is in the beginning of a second wave of COVID-19 pandemic. Efforts to track, test, isolate cases and quarantine contacts are limited there with no adherence to COVID-19 appropriate behaviour among people both in rural and urban areas," Bhushan wrote in the letter.
Pointing towards contact tracing, the Health Secretary's letter mentioned that the case-contact ratio is more than 1:20 in the state.
"Though it appears high, a deep dive into the methodology of contact tracing revealed that the main concept of contact tracing was not clearly understood by the field level staff, who were mainly listing the immediate family and neighborhood contacts," he added.
The Health Ministry Central team in its observation had written that night curfew, partial lockdowns and weekend lockdowns have a limited impact on curbing the virus transmission.
Meanwhile, Maharashtra on Tuesday reported 17,864 new COVID-19 cases. This is for the first time this year that over 17,000 COVID-19 cases have been recorded in the state in a single day. The previous highest single-day surge this year was 16,620 on Sunday, March 14.