Six days after several vaccination centres in Virudhunagar district ran out of stocks, the district on Wednesday received 10,500 doses, a meagre quantity of Covishield vaccine, which can last only for two days.
With the district having 95 vaccination centres, including private hospitals, the present stock will not be sufficient to continue with vaccination beyond two days.
While the district had been administering vaccines to around 4,000 persons every day, the administration had planned to increase the daily vaccination to 7,500 doses, as per the district Monitoring Officer S. Madhumathi.
“Already, all vaccination centres have a backlog for thousands of people who were scheduled to get their second dose, but could not get them in many centres for the last six days. The present stock cannot even fulfill the backlog requirements,” an official said.
Every day people have been visiting the centres and returning home disappointed.
The official said that private hospitals were facing more pressure as they had either collected the money for second dosage in advance or had issued tokens with details of schedule for second dose.
People who had been administered Covaxin injection have been given the second dosage too. The district had received very limited quantity of Covaxin.
A senior doctor expressed apprehension about sudden surge in demand for the vaccine after the Centre opened up vaccination for all persons above 18 years from May 1.
A senior official at a Government hospital in the district said that all those who returned home due to lack of vaccine had registered their names along with phone numbers in the last six days.
“We will send reminder through SMS to those people in the order of their visit and they would be given preference during the vaccination. In all probability, the meagre doses will be exhausted on Thursday,” he added.
However, a senior medical officer exuded hope that more doses will arrive soon.
The spurt in number of COVID-19 positive persons has driven people, who were hesitant to take the jab, to get vaccinted.
