Amid rising coronavirus cases in India, Dr Randeep Guleria, director of AIIMS and member of the national task force on COVID-19 management, has said that common Indians will have to wait till 2022 to get COVID-19 vaccine.

Dr Guleria asserted that it will take ‘more than a year’ for an authentic vaccine against the coronavirus to hit the Indian market. 

“In our country the population is large; we need time to see how the vaccine can be bought from the market like a flu vaccine and take it. That will actually be the ideal situation. So it could be the end of 2021 to the beginning of 2022″, Dr Guleria said in an exclusive interview with CNN-News18. 

Speaking about the sudden spike in the number of COVID-19 cases in Delhi, Dr Guleria said that there are several factors responsible for this increase in coronavirus cases in the national capital. “One is the weather. We know that respiratory viruses spike in the winter months; we have seen a drop in temperature in Delhi. There are higher chances of the virus surviving in outdoor air and people tend to crowd indoors during winters. The third factor is air pollution which is also contributing to the spike,” he said.

Meanwhile, India’s COVID-19 caseload went past 85 lakh, while the number of people who have recovered from the deadly viral disease jumped to 78,68,968 taking the national recovery rate to 92.49 per cent.

According to the Union Health Ministry data updated on Sunday, the total coronavirus cases mounted to 85,07,754 with 45,674 infections being reported in a day. The total death toll reached 1,26,121 with 559 new fatalities in the last 24 hours.

The case fatality rate stands at 1.48 per cent. The number of active cases of COVID-19 remained below 6 lakh for the tenth consecutive day.

There are 5,12,665 active cases of coronavirus infection in the country as on date which comprises 6.03 per cent of the total caseload, the data stated.