Health workers at a health camp in Mumbai

Maharashtra continues to remain the worst-affected state.The COVID-19 tally in the state rose to 3,91,440 on Tuesday with addition of 7,717 new cases while the death toll mounted by 282, including 121 fatalities in Mumbai region, to 14,165.

A sero-survey conducted by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation on 6,936 people from three wards found that 57 per cent respondents in slums had been exposed to and developed antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 virus, as opposed to 16 per cent in residential societies.

Those who were associated with the survey said that shared facilities like toilets, high population density and lack of physical distancing may be the reasons why those living in slums were 3.5 times more exposed to the virus than people living in housing societies.

Overall, the survey found that 40 per cent had had the infection. A surprise finding is that more women had been infected than men.

None of the nearly 7,000 people tested had taken a RT-PCR test for Covid-19, which means either they were aysmptomatically infected, or they may not have had serious enough symptoms to suspect they had caught the infection.

Covid-19 vaccine tracker: India at the centre of vaccine and Moderna’s phase III trials

Irrespective of how the vaccine candidates developed by Indian companies eventually perform, India would remain a central player, both as one of the biggest manufacturers of vaccines in the world, and also one of the biggest markets. As pointed out by the Dr Balram Bhargava, director general of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the other day, India controls nearly 60 per cent of the global supply of all kinds of vaccines.

Pune-based Serum Institute of India happens to be the largest manufacturer of vaccines in the world, and the company has entered an agreement to produce the vaccine being developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca. That vaccine candidate is supposed to be the one that a lot of scientists and health experts are currently betting on. The vaccine is currently undergoing phase III trials in at least two countries and is about to get into similar late stage trials in India soon.