In an age where milestones are being reached at both class rooms and the sporting turf, there’s another sphere where a different, life-saving, and hence, very pertinent milestone is being reached. And it’s the surface of the country known as India, among the largest democracies on the face of the earth and a nation stymied endlessly like several others by the dreaded Coronavirus.
Since the outbreak of the ghastly COVID 19 virus starting 2020 onwards, India has gone on to lose 4.7 lakh people. Let that sink in.
But to give a simple idea as to how big or small this number is, here’s what you need to know.
The overall population of the Caribbean island of St. Lucia is 1,83,627. That of Tibet, on the whole, is 6.7 million. And where certain cities in New Zealand stand, then the population of popular tourist destinations such as Rotorua, Hamilton, and Dunedin are 65,901, 1 lakh 52 thousand, 941 and 1 lakh fourteen thousand 347, respectively.
If the above doesn’t give much idea about just how many people India, now a vaccination success story, has gone on to lose, then it suffices to say that the number of fatalities in the country are several times more than the overall population of certain world cities.
Perhaps this should explain why India has, over the course of the last quarter of 2021, gone extensively toward a vaccination drive. And the results of the exercise are there for all to see.
That being said, in what can be described as a massive achievement, nearly one in every four Indians, where it stands right now, has been vaccinated. And a latest news report on the Hindustan Times happened to highlight the following:
As of Tuesday evening, India has administered 876.2 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine to 642.5 million people – making the country second only to China (1.1 billion people inoculated) in terms of the number of people who have received at least one dose of Covid-19 vaccine.
Of these, 233.6 million people have received both doses of the vaccine, while another 408.9 million people have been partially vaccinated. When these numbers are seen alongside the country’s projected adult population of 940 million (according to the Census of India’s National Commission on Population), this means that 68.3% of people above the age of 18 years have received vaccine shots – 24.8% are fully vaccinated and another 43.5% partially vaccinated.
The headline number on population coverage, however, glosses over the wide variations across different states. Himachal Pradesh leads the country in not only overall coverage, but also the proportion of people fully vaccinated – with the state’s entire adult population vaccinated with at least one dose and nearly half (48.3%) fully vaccinated. Kerala is on the second spot with 92.1% adults having received at least one dose and 40.3% having received both jabs. Uttarakhand (91.1% at least one dose and 38.2% both doses), Gujarat (85.3% and 38.1%, respectively) and Delhi (79.1% and 37.4%) make up the top five states in the country.
That told, in the coming days, it could be said with some amount of certainty that the country home to the world’s second highest population will only scale northward in the way it is approaching vaccination.