COVID-19 | India reports decline in active cases, Mexico develops vaccine after 2 years

The active cases currently comprise only 0.08 percent of the total infections, and the national COVID-19 recovery rate has been recorded at an impressive 98.73 percent, the ministry said.

Furthermore, 4,43,92,828 people have recovered from the disease so far, and the case fatality rate stands at 1.18 percent.

Delhi reported 272 new COVID-19 cases with a positivity rate of 8.39 percent and one death, the local health department recorded on Thursday.

The ministry's website also reports that 2.2 billion doses of the coronavirus vaccine have been administered across the country under the nationwide vaccination drive.

According to the Press Information Bureau, 2,363 doses of the vaccine were administered in the past 24 hours.

Mexico has finally developed its own COVID-19 vaccine, called Patria or Motherland, more than two years after inoculations from the US, Europe and China were rolled out, AP reported.

The vaccine is a joint effort between the government and a Mexican company, Avimex, which previously worked on animal vaccines.

Vaccine uptake in Mexico dropped in late 2022 and 2023, and Mexico still has millions of doses of the Abdala vaccine it bought from Cuba.

Patria will be used as a booster shot, though Dr Fidel Alejandro Sánchez, a council member of Mexican researchers, has doubts about using the vaccine, which was designed two years ago, against currently circulating virus strains.

"It is like reading yesterday's newspaper," Sánchez said. "It makes no sense to use it as a booster when it wasn't designed for that."

It is unclear whether the government medical approval agency has formally authorized Patria.

Mexico's official death toll of test-confirmed COVID-19 deaths stands at almost 334,000, but testing was scarce in the early days of the pandemic and the government's own review of death certificates shows more than 505,000 deaths where COVID-19 was listed as a cause of contributing cause of death.