1.8K of 4.3K show up for their 2nd jab

New Delhi: The vaccination drive against COVID-19 picked up pace on Saturday as 1,856 healthcare workers, who had received their first shots on day one of the exercise four weeks ago, turned up to get their second dose. However, the turnout for the second dose was about 43 per cent only.

Under the nationwide mega vaccination drive launched on January 16, a total of 4,319 (53 per cent) health workers, against a target of 8,117, were administered the shots at 81 centres across the city on day one.

As per doctors, the second dose is to given to a beneficiary after a gap of 28 days.

On Saturday, a total of 13,768 beneficiaries received vaccine shots and administering of the second dose began for healthcare workers who had received the first jab 28 days ago, a senior official said.

"Out of the total number of healthcare workers, 1,856 received second dose today and 3,530 got the first jab. Also, 8,382 frontline workers also got their first shots today," he said.

Meanwhile, no fresh death from COVID-19 was recorded on Saturday in Delhi, the second time in February when the single-day fatality count was zero, according to data shared by the city health department. On February 9, no fatality from the coronavirus was registered in the national capital, after a gap of nearly nine months.

Delhi recorded 126 fresh COVID-19 cases and no death due to the pandemic on Saturday, while the positivity rate stood at 0.21 per cent, according to the latest bulletin issued by the Delhi health department.

These 126 new cases came out of the 60,876 tests conducted the previous day. The fresh cases pushed the infection tally to 6,36,796, in the city, authorities said. The total number of tests conducted the previous day included 38,921 RT-PCR tests and 21,955 rapid antigen tests, the bulletin said.