COURTESY HT DEC 29
Vaccination dry run kicks off in 4 states
Two-day exercise begins in Punjab, Assam, Andhra, Gujarat; data being monitored through online platform
Rhythma Kaul
letters@hindustantimes.com
New Delhi : Health care and grassroots staff in four states — one each in the county’s east, north, west and south — carried out drills for coronavirus vaccinations on Monday, testing the core technology platform, transport arrangements, and the methods for monitoring and reporting serious side effects.
The exercise was carried out in Sonitpur and Nalbari districts in Assam, Rajkot and Gandhinagar in Gujarat, Ludhiana and Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar (Nawanshahr) in Punjab and Krishna district in Andhra Pradesh. Further drills will be held on Tuesday.
The exercise comes at a time when drug regulators are expected any day to take a decision on giving emergency approvals to pave way for the first shots to be given. The country targets to deliver doses, likely to be in a regimen of two, to 300 million people by the summer – one of the largest logistical exercises to be undertaken outside of the elections.
According to officials aware of the process, Monday’s drills largely focused on testing the digital platform Co-Win but transportation, cold storage and crowd management at vaccination centres were also assessed.
“Two generic problems were faced by all states that we are trying to sort out: one was during the adverse event reporting wherein the staff had to originally wait for the entire session of 100 people to end before they could upload the information...
“Another that has been seen is mapping of pincode against villages; if the pincode is not mapped in the app then the staff on ground will have to do it manually after due verification against the address mentioned by the beneficiary. There is always a margin for error when you are verifying something manually, which is why we will ensure all pincodes are mapped,” said a senior health ministry official, asking not to be named. In the case of the first problem, this person explained, authorities would need to wait till all 100 people in one session are vaccinated before they can report the side effects, which could lead to a delay. “It has, therefore, been decided to make modifications in the app to allow real-time feeding of adverse event report post vaccination,” said the official.
According to Krishna district collector Imtiaz Ahmed, the drills for vaccination centres were held in teams of five. “In all, three chambers were identified for the exercise – registration of beneficiaries in the first chamber, vaccination in the second chamber and evaluation in the third chamber,” he said.
There were five vaccination centres for the drill in the district, comprising 25 health care workers. The exercise was videotaped at all five centres.