Door to door screening by health officials in Odisha (Express photo)

With Assam joining the league, the top ten states with maximum caseloads now all have more than one lakh people infected with novel coronavirus.

Simultaneously, Mizoram discovered 29 new cases on Friday to take its confirmed infections beyond 1,000. With that, every state and union territory in the country, except Lakshadweep, now has at least 1,000 people who have been infected with the disease. Lakshadweep continues to remain completely untouched by the epidemic, with no case of infection having been reported from the islands so far.

Also on Friday, Andhra Pradesh crossed the four-lakh figure for confirmed infections and is all set to overtake Tamil Nadu in a couple of days to become the state with the second highest caseload in the country. After a few days of relative dip, Andhra Pradesh has once again started reporting more than 10,000 new cases every day, next only to Maharashtra, which has been discovering more than 14,000 cases for the last few days.

Covid-19 vaccine tracker

The timeline for a novel Coronavirus vaccine seems to have got firmly advanced, from early next year to this year-end. On Friday, US President Donald Trump promised to produce a vaccine before the end of this year, “or may be even sooner”.

And in a separate development, Britain said it would amend its laws to ensure that a novel Coronavirus vaccine is given emergency approval as soon as it is declared to be safe in clinical trials. It said it would not wait for the full licensing process to get completed. The new legal provision could kick in as early as October this year, enabling its drug regulator to grant emergency approvals to a vaccine that has been proven safe. The changed law would also protect the pharmaceutical companies from being sued if the vaccines produced any side-effects.