The Health Department has decided to step in and make special arrangements to ease the process of vaccinating senior citizens and those above 45 years with co-morbidities against COVID-19.
A huge number of people with online scheduled vaccination appointments and those walking in for spot-registrations at vaccination sites have been posing serious logistics challenges for the Health Department for the past four days.
Till March 3, a total of 30,061 senior citizens have received COVID-19 vaccination, an official release said here. The Health Department has asked the Centre to resolve the issues faced by people in getting online registration and appointments for vaccination on the CoWIN portal. The crowding witnessed at vaccination sites these past three days could in fact torpedo the careful COVID-19 containment activities taken up by the Health Department.
There is no need to panic and show haste in securing vaccination appointments, because the State has plenty of vaccine stock at present. Moreover, the Centre has also informed that 21 lakh doses would be arriving on March 9, an official release said.
More sites
The Health Department will be increasing the number of vaccination sites in phases. The vaccination sessions in each site would be planned ahead. Sessions for 15 days would be created and uploaded on the CoWIN portal. All districts will fix the number of sites planned for each day and inform the State Health administration. The districts will ensure that the details of the sites and sessions every day are made available to the public through print and social media. Districts can modify the list depending on regional requirements.
Token system
The Health Department has directed the districts to ensure that those who come to a vaccination site with a scheduled vaccination appointment secured online are not sent back with a token. Instead, the token system could be made applicable for spot registrations.
The number of online appointments and spot registrations would be restricted to specific numbers every day, so as to reduce crowding.
Till March 3,3,47,801 health-care workers have received at least one dose vaccine and of these, 1,31,143 have received both shots. So far, 91,916 front-line workers and 1,14,243 poll officials have also received a dose of vaccine each.
