Apollo Hospitals has so far trained 6,000 staff to give out jabs across its network of 71 hospitals, hundreds of clinics and thousands of pharmacies, according to Managing Director Suneeta Reddy, who said the company’s talks with officials in New Delhi had yet to provide any firm guidance.

“We need to know if the government wants to handle the whole thing or allow the private sector to do it,” Reddy said in an interview Tuesday.

“The issue here is how can we double the amount of people that can be vaccinated,” she said from Chennai, adding that Apollo is ready to help in any capacity. The government “can do it, but it will take time.”

Others that are likely to benefit from an expected surge in demand are: pharmaceutical firms Dr Reddy’s Laboratories, Cadila Healthcare and Hetero; logistics company FedEx; cold chain storage specialist Snowman Logistics and Hindustan Syringes & Medical Devices, among others.

Hindustan Syringes says it will increase capacity by 42% to 1 billion units by the first half of next year. It has already shipped some 140 million syringes that disable themselves after one use for the global vaccine distribution program COVAX.

SII has already made and stockpiled more than 50 million doses of COVISHIELD and aims to ramp up production to 400 million doses by mid-2021. It has already applied for emergency use authorization of the vaccine in India.

The company could sell the vaccine at 250 rupees ($3.39) per dose to the Indian government and 1,000 rupees on the country’s private market. By comparison, the Pfizer’s supply deal with the U.S. government amounts to $39 for a two-dose course, while Moderna plans to charge between $25 and $37 per dose.

The number of people who have recuperated from the disease surged to 92,15,581, pushing the national recovery rate to 94.66 per cent, while the COVID-19 case fatality rate stood at 1.45 per cent.

There are 3,78,909 active coronavirus infections in the country now which comprises 3.89 per cent of the total caseload, the data stated.
The COVID-19 active caseload remained below four lakh for the third consecutive day.