19,079 New Coronavirus Cases Take India's Tally To 1.03 Crore

Here's your 10-point cheatsheet to this big story:

1. India detected four more cases of the UK Covid variant taking the highly viral strain's tally to 29 in the country.
2. Even as more passengers, who entered India from UK in the month before flight ban are being traced and tested, flight operations between the two countries will resume from January 8, Union Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri informed on Friday.
3. With the new virus strain threatening to undo India's progress in checking Covid numbers, the centre is looking to start giving vaccine shots from this month, once it is cleared for a final time.
4. The Oxford COVID-19 vaccine, manufactured by the Serum Institute of India, has been cleared by a government-appointed panel of experts. It will now be sent for approval to the regulator Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI).
5. A pan-India dry run to check the best way to vaccinate people against COVID-19 and plug loopholes in logistics and training will be held today. This drive will also test the operational feasibility in the use of CoWIN application - digital platform to roll out and scale up the vaccination drive - in a field environment.
6. India plans to vaccinate 30 crore people over the next six to eight months, starting with doctors, nurses, other frontline workers, like the police, and a section of the country's vulnerable population.
7. An exercise is on to identify people with comorbidities so they get vaccinated for COVID-19 first, Director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Dr Randeep Guleria, told NDTV. "For example, someone with diabetes but with well-controlled diet and another who has been on insulin for 10 years, the person with the more serious diabetes becomes higher priority than the person who is stable," the AIIMS Director said.
8. Kerala, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh and Tamil Nadu were the five worst-hit states in terms of new infections. While Kerala logged almost 5,000 new cases, Maharashtra's were at 3,500 followed by West Bengal (1153), while the last two logged around 900 cases each. The first three states, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh recorded the highest deaths.
9. While the daily case count in India continues to slide down, the US- world's worst hit in terms of absolute numbers where number have been rising since the November Presidential elections - crossed the grim milestone of more than 2 crore COVID-19 cases, and 3.5 lakh deaths.
10. The United Kingdom has reactivated emergency hospitals built at the start of the pandemic and shut primary schools in London to counter the rapid spread of a much more infectious variant of the coronavirus. With more than 50,000 new daily cases of COVID-19 for the last four days, the health service said it was preparing for an anticipated rush of patients and needed more beds.