Here are the top updates from Thursday:

  1. The World Health Organization has said that any Covid-19 vaccine it has authorised for emergency use should be accepted by countries as restrictions on travel are eased. So far, the United Nations health body has approved Covid-19 vaccines of Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca-Oxford, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, Sinopharm, and Sinovac for emergency use.
  2. India recorded 48,786 new coronavirus cases and 1,005 deaths in a span of 24 hours, data from the Union health ministry showed. With this, the infection tally climbed to 3,04,11,634 and the toll to 3,99,459 since the pandemic broke out in January last year. There are currently 5,23,257 active cases in the country.
  3. Pharmaceutical company Zydus Cadila said that it has applied for emergency use authorisation of ZyCov-D, its three-dose coronavirus vaccine. The company’s Managing Director Sharvil Patel said the company expected to produce one crore vaccine doses per month from August onwards and five crore doses by December this year.
  4. The Karnataka government made it mandatory for passengers travelling to the state from Kerala to produce negative RT-PCR test certificates not older than 72 hours.
  5. World Health Organization Chief Scientist Soumya Swaminathan told NDTV that the Delta plus variant of Covid-19 is not a “variant of concern” for the global health agency yet as the number of cases of the strain were still low.
  6. World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for a global initiative to vaccinate at least 10% of the population of every country by September. He added that the coronavirus pandemic can end only when everyone is vaccinated.  
  7. Chhattisgarh has recorded 43,062 more deaths between April and May during the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic. This was 4.85 times the official reported toll in the same period.
  8. Prime Minister Narendra Modi thanked doctors for their contribution in the fight against Covid-19 in an address on National Doctor’s Day.
  9. The World Health Organization has said that the Delta variant of the coronavirus is expected to become the dominant strain of the infection in the coming months.  
  10. Globally, the coronavirus disease has infected over 18.21 crore people and killed more than 39.45 lakh since the pandemic broke out in December 2019, according to Johns Hopkins University.