Covid second wave not yet over in India: govt

India’s devastating second coronavirus wave, which has raged since March and killed thousands of people, is not over yet, a senior government official said yesterday, warning citizens to avoid crowding at tourist places.“The war is not over yet,” Vinod Kumar Paul, who heads a federal government panel on vaccines told a news conference yesterday, minutes after a video was played showing maskless people crowding at a waterfall in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand.India is now reporting a tenth of its peak daily numbers in May.Yesterday it reported 43,393 new Covid-19 cases in the last 24 hours, according to data from the health ministry, down from more than 400,000 in May.Health officials said more than half of new Covid-19 infections were being reported from the southern state of Kerala and western state of Maharashtra, with the health ministry working with the states to control the spread of infections.Kerala on Thursday reported 13,772 Covid-19 cases and has seen its daily case number rise in the past three days, prompting its health minister to warn that cases would not decline if safety protocols were not followed.But health experts said the recent uptick in Kerala’s numbers was not enough to point to a trend, and could be attributed to better testing and tracing facilities. “The seven-day moving average has begun to move upwards in the last couple of days, but it would have to be a consistent upward trend to worry me,” said Rijo John, a professor at the Rajagiri College of Social Sciences in the southern city of Kochi.The country’s vaccination drive has also slowed down, with less than a tenth of the 950mn eligible adult population fully vaccinated so far, two months after the federal government opened inoculations for all adults.India administered an average of 3.7mn doses a day this week, similar to last week.The Indian government yesterday said that it is working actively with vaccine manufacturer Moderna to see how its Covid vaccine –– which was granted emergency use authorisation last month –– can be imported and made available in the country.“Moderna vaccine is under emergency use authorisation. The government is working actively with the manufacturers to see how to make this vaccine available in the country, importing it into the country, those efforts are on the process that has to be gone through is being actively pursued,” Paul said.Meanwhile, Sanofi SA and GlaxoSmithKline have received an approval from Indian authorities for a late-stage clinical trial of their protein-based Covid-19 vaccine candidate, the drugmakers said.France’s Sanofi and Britain’s GSK in May kicked off global trials to include more than 35,000 adults to test the shot. They hope to get approvals by the end of 2021 after early-stage results showed the vaccine produces a robust immune response.The Indian arm of the studies will enrol roughly 3,000 adults between the ages of 18 years and 55 years, according to India’s clinical trial registry.The assessment is expected to run for a year and the first enrolment in India is shown to have been made on Tuesday.