Budget 2018-19

  The cumulative number of Covid-19 vaccine doses administered in the country has surpassed 190 million, the Union Health Ministry said on Thursday The cumulative number of COVID-19 vaccine doses administered in the country has surpassed 19 crore, the Union Health Ministry said on Thursday. On the day-125 of the vaccination drive on Thursday, a total of 14,56,088 vaccine doses — 12,73,785 first dose and 1,82,303 second dose — were given according to provisional report till 8 PM, the ministry data showed. The ministry said of these 7,36,514 beneficiaries in the age group of 18-44 received their first dose on Thursday, and cumulatively the number reached 85,84,054 since the start of phase-3 of the vaccination drive on May 1. “India achieves a new landmark in its vaccination drive as the cumulative number of COVID-19 vaccine doses administered in the country exceeded 19 Cr (19,18,10,604) as per the 8 pm provisional report,” the ministry said about the overall vaccination figures so fa...

Leaders and scientists need to figure out what should be done to combat variants of the virus. It will be a while before it’s fully understood why  India  has been so swiftly and so disastrously engulfed by the coronavirus. But there is one thing for sure: India’s problem is now the world’s problem. India shut down too abruptly when the virus arrived, and then was too quick to reopen. In March 2020, the country was locked down at four hours’ notice though it did not yet have many cases. Millions of people, many of them migrant workers, were left stranded without food and shelter. Facing economic disaster, the government reopened the country before the pandemic really took hold. What is happening in India now is quite similar to what the United States experienced in its coronavirus surges. The Indian states where deaths started to mount again in March and April simply closed their eyes and hoped it would go away. After all, India’s first virus wave receded, for reasons that rem...

  China halting flights to India could hurt pharma supplies, say companies Drugmakers in India are warning that a halt on some cargo flights from China could imperil an important link in the global pharmaceutical supply chain. The U.S. relies heavily on India to stock its medicine cabinets, and any slowdown in output could leave pharmacies short of drugs used regularly by millions of Americans. On April 26, China’s state-run Sichuan Airlines suspended cargo flights to India for 15 days amid an alarming second Covid-19 outbreak there. China supplies 60% to 70% of the raw materials used by India’s drugmakers, as well as ingredients for finished medicines sent to markets worldwide, according to Mahesh Doshi, national president for the Indian Drug Manufacturers’ Association. If the flights remain on hold, the drug industry fears “cascading effects on its entire supply chain,” Doshi wrote in an April 29 letter to India’s external affairs minister. That could lead to domestic shortages o...

  Supplemental oxygen makes the difference between life and death for many Covid-19 patients. The desperate scenes playing out in India may foreshadow a dangerous new phase of the pandemic where people die in droves, not of the disease so much as a lack of proper medical care. The situation could get a lot worse thanks to a sudden shortage of medical oxygen in the country.Oxygen is one of most straightforward and proactive ways of treating the disease, which causes hypoxia. When patients begin gasping for air, a steady supply of concentrated oxygen does wonders. It may seem like an obvious treatment in hindsight, yet it took nearly two centuries to overcome strange theories, outright quackery and trench warfare in the medical community and beyond.Oxygen’s history in medicine begins in the 1770s, when the Swedish pharmacist Karl Scheele and the British scientist Joseph Priestly independently isolated oxygen gas. Priestly unfairly received the lion’s share of the credit. To make matt...