In just 10 days, Telangana’s COVID vaccine stocks drop by 60 per cent

Hyderabad: The sudden rush for COVID-19 vaccine shots in the last 10 days has led to a sharp drop of over 60 per cent in Telangana's stocks - from 8.8 lacks to 3.6 lacks. Of this, 60,302 is Covishield while the remaining is Covaxin. There's zero availability of Corbevax, said health officials.

But even as its vaccine stock plummets, Telangana has not received any fresh supplies from the Centre, despite health minister T Harish Rao urging the Union government to release 25 lakh doses on December 23.

Between then and now, 14 lakh doses (second and precaution) have been administered across Telangana, mostly in the private sector. In fact, the daily average of vaccine uptake in the state has jumped to 1.2 lakh doses. Though briefly, after the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, the count of doses administered per day had crossed two lakh on many occasions.

However, it dropped drastically after the third wave and was just about 5,000 to 7,000 till about a month ago. Given this revived demand for vaccines now, which is likely to rise further, officials fear they might soon run out of supplies.

They attributed this rush to a spike in international travel and concern about the new variants among a small section of people. Telangana has to still administer 1.55 crore doses to achieve 100 per cent vaccination. “Since we have been keeping a close watch on the number of COVID cases in other countries... we did anticipate an increase in demand. And that’s exactly what we are seeing now.

That is also why the minister had raised a request with the Centre to release more stocks. Unfortunately, we are yet to get any response from there,” said a senior official from the Telangana health department.

Officials said the current stocks will last another 10 days — 70 per cent to 80 per cent of it being absorbed by private players. “We are seeing more demand for Covishield and its stocks are running very low. Though Corbevax is also in demand, we are not being able to administer it at all since it has not been available for over a month now,” said the official.