Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Jan 9: The Corona vaccine has finally arrived. The mass vaccination drive to provide a shield to its 130 crores population against Coronavirus will begin in India on January 16, the central government announced on Saturday.
“Priority will be given to the healthcare workers and the frontline workers, estimated to be around 3 crore, followed by those above 50 years and the under-50 population groups with co-morbidities numbering around 27 crore,” an official release from the union health ministry said.
Apparently the drive begins after the “inauspicious month” as per the Hindu calendar is over with various religious ceremonies and harvest festivals like Lohri, Makar Sankranti, Pongal, Magh Bihu, Uttarayan and several other in different states on January 14.
Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while addressing the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas said India was ready to save humanity by providing doses of the two Indian-manufactured vaccines that have been cleared for emergency use, Covishield and Covaxin, to the rest of the world.
The Centre has started a new COVID platform to track particulars of potential vaccine beneficiaries and also issue electronic certificates to them.
An Operational Guidelines for the roll-out of vaccine was issued by the health ministry on December 20 and States began conducting dry run from January 2.
The central announcement came after the prime minister chaired a meeting to review the status of the coronavirus pandemic in the country along with the preparedness of the states and Union Territories (UTs) for the vaccination drive. The meeting was attended by the cabinet secretary, principal secretary to PM, health secretary, and other senior officials concerned, the release added.
“After the detailed review, it was decided that in view of the forthcoming festivals including Lohri, Makar Sankranti, Pongal, Magh Bihu etc., the vaccination will start from 16th January 2021,” the release said.
During the meeting, PM Modi was briefed about the preparedness status of the Centre in close collaboration with states and UTs for rolling out vaccine doses in near future and was also informed about the Co-Win app. Co-Win is a digitised platform that will provide real time information of vaccine stocks, storage temperature and individualised tracking of beneficiaries of the vaccine. Over 7.9 million beneficiaries have been registered on the app.
The release pointed out that over 61,000 program managers, 200,00 vaccinators and 370,000 other vaccination team members have been trained so far as part of the training at the states, districts and block levels.
The country-wide third dry run to help the administration spot out ay lacunae in the mass inoculation drive was carried out on Friday covering 4,895 session sites, 615 districts in 33 States/UTs.
Earlier, India had conducted two mass vaccination dry runs in the country. The first mock drill was conducted in four states namely Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Gujarat and Punjab for two days starting December 28, 2020. The second mock drill was conducted across all states and union territories in the country on January 2, 2021.
The nationwide dry run on January 2, 2021, was conducted in all states at 259 sites across 116 districts, according to the health ministry. The dry run also saw the active participation of the central health minister Harsh Vardhan who inspected and oversaw the dry run at one of the hospitals in Delhi, and the state health officials, in their respective states.
In the latest round of mock drill on Friday, the central health minister visited the Rajiv Gandhi General Hospital (RGGH) in Chennai and other public and private hospitals to oversee the dry run programme in the Tamil Nadu.
Two vaccines against the Covid-19 disease — Covishield from the Serum Institute of India and Covaxin from Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech — have been authorised by India’s medical regulator, Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI).
India has so far registered over 10.43 million Covid-19 disease cases till Saturday of which 150,798 people have lost their lives. The active cases continue to remain below the 300,000-mark while the recoveries are over 10 million and constitute 96.41 per cent of the total caseload.