State administers over 43K booster doses in a day to frontline workers, elderly

Kolkata: Bengal on Friday administered 43,254 booster or precautionary doses of Covid vaccine on the health professionals, front-line workers and senior citizens.

As many as 1,12,952 doses have been administered on youths in the age group 15-18 on Friday.

The state has cumulatively administered over 11.32 crore doses so far in Bengal since the immunization drive began. The health department administered around 6,46,104 doses among the general population on Friday. Around 4,50,98,835 people in the state have received double doses so far while around 6,79,03,883 people have got their first jab so far. Incidentally, around 2.80 lakh people in Kolkata have skipped the second dose of Covid vaccine.

The doctors, front line workers and the senior citizens who are eligible to get the booster dose but fail to get it due to Covid infection, they will have to wait for another 3 months to get the booster.

It was learnt that the there is no detailed guidelines from the Center to the state in this regard. Various countries are however administering booster dose with 3 weeks in case the beneficiaries get infected.

It has already been come to light that around 77.2 per cent of the total Covid infected patients who have undergone tests recently have been found Omicron positive.

In another development, after the National Institute of Biomedical Genomics in Kalyani, the ICMR- National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases (NICED) in Kolkata emerges as the second center in the state to conduct genome sequencing.