Coronavirus live updates: India's indigenous vaccine against Covid-19 Covaxin achieves remarkable feat, says ICMR

India recorded 23,950 new Covid-19 cases, 26,895 recoveries, and 333 deaths in the last 24 hours, as per the health ministry. Total cases have risen to 1,00,99,066. Active cases now stand at 2,89,240. Total recoveries are 96,63,382. The total death toll has climbed to 1,46,444.

Mexico will begin Covid-19 immunizations on Thursday, a day after the country receives its first batch of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, Undersecretary of Health Hugo Lopez-Gatell said Tuesday. "Tomorrow (Wednesday) the first consignment of the Pfizer vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 arrives," he said.

India is likely to approve Oxford’s coronavirus vaccine for emergency use by next week after its local manufacturer submitted additional data sought by authorities, two sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Tuesday. This could be the first country to give the regulatory green light for the British drugmaker’s vaccine as the British medicine regulator continues to examine data from the trials. India, the world’s biggest vaccine-making country, wants to start inoculating its citizens next month and is also considering emergency use authorisation applications for vaccines made by Pfizer Inc and local company Bharat Biotech.

India recorded nearly 24,000 fresh Covid cases on Tuesday, with the trend of decline in cases continuing as compared to the average count in the previous week. On Monday, daily cases had dipped to a 175-day low of 18,588, as per data collated by TOI from state governments. On Tuesday, the number of fresh cases stood at 23,866, with data from Assam yet to come till late at night. While Tuesday's tally may appear to be a sharp jump from the previous day's count, it is not so. That's because cases fall steeply every Monday due to lower testing and staff shortage over the weekend.

A healthy adult infected with Covid-19 tests negative in about 10 days. However, in case of an immune-compromised patient — for example, a person suffering from cancer or end-stage kidney disease — it can take a month or more for the infection to go away completely. This trend has been observed among patients in India as well as abroad.

President Donald Trump is assailing the bipartisan $900 billion pandemic relief package that Congress just passed and is suggesting that he may not sign it.

Drug makers including BioNTech and Moderna are scrambling to test their Covid-19 vaccines against the new fast-spreading variant of the virus that is raging in Britain, the latest challenge in the breakneck race to curb the pandemic.

Pune-based Serum Institute of India (SII) has submitted additional updated data from clinical trials of Covishield sought by the drug regulator’s panel evaluating Covid vaccine applications for emergency use authorisation, official sources said, reports Sushmi Dey.