COVID-19: Delhi reports over 17,000 cases and 9 deaths in last 24 hours

Nine people have died due to the virus in the last 24 hours, bringing the death tally to 25,136 since March 2020. The tally of active cases in Delhi stands at 39,873 with a case fatality rate of 1.67 percent.

Moneycontrol News

January 07, 2022 / 21:34 IST

(Representative image: Reuters)

The daily COVID-19 cases continued to rise unabated in Delhi on January 7. The national capital has registered 17,335 new cases in the last 24 hours. The tally is close to what the city had seen at the peak of the second COVID wave, when on May 8, 2021, 17,364 cases were reported with a positivity rate of 23.34 percent. The current positivity rate stands at 17.73 percent.

Nine people have died due to the virus in the last 24 hours, bringing the death tally to 25,136 since March 2020. The tally of active cases in Delhi stands at 39,873 with a case fatality rate of 1.67 percent.

In terms of healthcare facilities, the national capital as of the evening of January 7 has 11,922 vacant hospital beds, 3,953 vacant COVID care centres, and 157 vacant COVID health care centres.

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The total number of patients admitted to the hospital is 1,390 out of which 1,313 are COVID-positive and the rest 77 are suspected of the virus. While 996 or 75.85 percent of patients are mild cases without any oxygen support, 286 (21.78 percent) are moderate cases on oxygen support and 31 (2.36 percent) patients are severe cases on ventilator support.

The figures that came in today are quite similar to what Delhi Health Minister Satyendra Jain had predicted earlier in the day. He had said that the city is expecting around 17,000 cases with a positivity rate of around 17 percent.

COVID-19 Vaccine

Frequently Asked Questions

How does a vaccine work?

A vaccine works by mimicking a natural infection. A vaccine not only induces immune response to protect people from any future COVID-19 infection, but also helps quickly build herd immunity to put an end to the pandemic. Herd immunity occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population becomes immune to a disease, making the spread of disease from person to person unlikely. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 virus has been fairly stable, which increases the viability of a vaccine.

How many types of vaccines are there?

There are broadly four types of vaccine — one, a vaccine based on the whole virus (this could be either inactivated, or an attenuated [weakened] virus vaccine); two, a non-replicating viral vector vaccine that uses a benign virus as vector that carries the antigen of SARS-CoV; three, nucleic-acid vaccines that have genetic material like DNA and RNA of antigens like spike protein given to a person, helping human cells decode genetic material and produce the vaccine; and four, protein subunit vaccine wherein the recombinant proteins of SARS-COV-2 along with an adjuvant (booster) is given as a vaccine.

What does it take to develop a vaccine of this kind?

Vaccine development is a long, complex process. Unlike drugs that are given to people with a diseased, vaccines are given to healthy people and also vulnerable sections such as children, pregnant women and the elderly. So rigorous tests are compulsory. History says that the fastest time it took to develop a vaccine is five years, but it usually takes double or sometimes triple that time.

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