The special drive conducted by the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) for four days to inoculate those who missed the second dose of Covaxin managed to cover more than 50% of the target group.
Officials from the GCC said another round of tracking and follow-ups would be planned to identify and inoculate those who missed the second dose within the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR)-advised window of four to six weeks.
Data collated by the civic body from COWIN portal last week showed that around 50,000 people, who took their first dose of Covaxin in the city, had missed the second dose within the maximum advised window.
Prior to this, the GCC had identified and inoculated another 30,000 such people who had missed their second dose.
Consequently, the special drive was launched to cover 50,000 people. “Of these, our data showed that only around 30,000 had actually missed it. The rest must have taken their second dose, but this was not reflected in the COWIN portal due to duplication issues. Some might have taken their second dose outside Chennai as well,” a senior official said.
Of this target of 30,000 people, the official said the city managed to cover 16,000 people during the special drive over four days. Highlighting that further analysis would be done to identify the remaining people who missed the jab, the official said another round of follow-ups would be done through telecounselling centres and door-to-door fever survey workers.
“In the past few days, more such people who missed their second dose must have been added to this list. We will obtain relevant data from the COWIN portal and work out a strategy to cover them,” he added.
Booking open
The Greater Chennai Corporation on Monday reopened its portal for booking slots for vaccination. The vaccination programme was stopped on Monday owing to a shortage of vaccines.
