novel coronavirus first emerged in China, it has infected about 76 million and killed over 1.6 million across the globe. India’s official count of covid cases crossed 10 million last week, with over 145,000 lives lost to it.
By government data, our trend of daily new infections hit a high in mid-September and has been on a slide after that. Yet, letting covid burn itself out was never an option, even if large urban clusters were found to be acquiring antibodies through social exposure.
Vaccines have therefore been in the spotlight. At least two, one by Pfizer-BioNTech and the other by Moderna, have got approval for emergency use in the US.