Director General of ICMR, Balram Bhargava. While addressing a daily press briefing on COVID-19, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) on Tuesday revealed that the human trials of the two indigenous vaccines for COVID had begun and that there were approximately 1000 human volunteers for the same. “The two candidates have got their sites ready and they are doing their clinical study on approximately a 1000 human volunteers each at different sites,”

One of the primary runners in the race to develop India’s first vaccine is Bharat Biotech, which has been developing a vaccine in collaboration with the ICMR and the NIV. The company received its DCGI nod on June 29 to go ahead with the human trials.

“There are 2 Indian indigenous candidate vaccines. They have undergone successful toxicity studies in rats, mice and rabbits. The data was submitted to DCGI following which both these got clearance to start early phase human trials early this month,” added Balram Bhargava.

Meanwhile giving the daily COVID update, the Union Health Ministry revealed that the recovered cases had become 1.18 times more than the active cases. “From May 2 to May 30, a number of active COVID-19 cases was more than recovered cases. After that, the difference between the number of active and recovered cases is rising. Today, the number of recovered cases is 1.8 times higher than the active cases,” said Rajesh Bhushan, OSD, Ministry of Health.

The Ministry added that 86% of the country’s total cases were confined to 10 states, two of which had 50% of the cases–Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, while other 8 accounted for 36% of the total cases.

“In May, the recovery rate was around 26 per cent which rose to 48 per cent by May end & further increased to around 63 per cent by July 12 in the country. Recovery rates in 20 states are higher than the national recovery rate,” said Rajesh Bhushan, OSD, Ministry of Health.

As of June 14, the total tally of the infected cases stands at 9,06,752, of which 3,11,565 are active cases while the country has witnessed 23,727 fatalities due to the virus. The recovery rate of the country is improving at a steady rate with 5,71,460 recoveries so far.