Stocks of Indian companies with exposure to Europe fell on Tuesday amid concerns about the impact on their sales in case the Russia-Ukraine crisis worsens and the US and its allies impose economic sanctions on Russia. While top conglomerates, including Reliance Industries, the Tata group, and Aditya Birla Group, said they did not have any significant exposure to Russia, executives of some of the oil and gas, pharmaceutical, and tea companies said they were monitoring the situation closely as they earned substantial income from the region. Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday ordered troops into two breakaway regions of eastern Ukraine after announcing that Russia would recognise their independence.
While the infection has been mild in most reported cases, those below two years of age are showing signs of acute infection.
Adar Poonawalla says it took a five-minute chat with his father Cyrus before making the decision to manufacture Covishield. The bet paid off, and handsomely. Serum Institute now has the capacity to make 4 billion doses of Covishield annually.
The company had in December said that the CDSCO had approved a 12-month shelf life for Covaxin, which was nine months earlier, Sohini Das reports.
A back of the envelope calculation shows that India has roughly over 680 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines consisting primarily of Covishield doses.
Serum Institute has the capacity to make 250 million doses of Covishield monthly.
India's time use survey for January-December 2019 had found that an average person in urban areas spends 485 (eight hours and five minutes) minutes on employment and related activities.
Bharat Biotech is targeting to manufacture one billion doses of its intra-nasal vaccine in 2022 which is under clinical trials now.
'Antibodies remain in the blood for at least seven to nine months.'
'Someone may have diabetes, but at what level the disease qualifies as a comorbid condition is something a doctor will decide upon and certify accordingly.'
If the vaccine is recommended for use as a booster against Omicron, it may significantly boost the demand for Covishield in India.
If booster shots are given on priority, the pace of vaccination may slow further. In the worst case scenario, the country will take till mid-March to vaccinate its entire adult population partially.
West Bengal, Rajasthan and Bihar were worst in terms of women marrying at an early age.
States' spending doesn't improve the public image of the police, so where is the money going?
Tokenisation is the process of replacing debit and credit card numbers with a set of characters or tokens.
As the Omicron variant of Sars-CoV-2 takes centrestage, vaccine makers in India are of the view that scaling up the existing vaccines to make them more effective is possible.
The share of total health expenditure as part of the gross domestic product (GDP) went down to 3.3 per cent in 2017-18 from 3.8 per cent in the previous two years, according to the national health account data released on Monday by the health ministry. The share of government expenditure as part of total expenditure as well as GDP has gone up from from 3.78 per cent to 5.12 per cent between 2013-14 and 2017-18, which could also explain a decline seen in out of pocket expenditure in 2017-18. Health ministry also emphasised the increase in the government health expenditure as part of the total GDP from 1.15 per cent in 2013-14 to 1.35 per cent in 2017-18.
After ramping up production to meet the steep demand spike during the Covid-19 pandemic, Indian medical device makers are now struggling with idle capacity. According to industry estimates, around a third of the installed capacity, especially for consumables, disposables, small-ticket electronic items, etc., is lying unutilised. Sample this: India used to produce just 6.24 million pieces of PPE kits per annum before the pandemic, but by June this was ramped up to 233.87 million pieces per annum.
'Antiviral treatment will have no change. Spike protein change may affect the immunity protection.'
With around 2 million Covid vaccine doses likely to get wasted in December, leading hospital chains have now started to give it gratis to citizens. Sohini Das and Ruchika Chitravanshi report.