Patients of hypertension, diabetes and those having heart ailments are expected to be the first ones with comorbidities to be vaccinated on a priority basis in India, officials involved in vaccine-management say.
There is also a door-to-door survey to be conducted in order to identify such patients, as well as to establish the database for those over the age of 50. These would be people in the general public, who will get access to the vaccine first, alongside workers involved in health care services, frontline services, municipal services, among others.
"The voter list already provides us the age-wise profile of the people in a locality. We have to conduct a door-to-door survey to reconfirm the names and also find out comorbidities. Anganwadi workers and Accredited Social Health Activists (Asha) would be tapped for this purpose," said an official, requesting anonymity.
This categorisation of the public into three priority-categories accounts for about 300 million people of India's total population of over 1.3 billion.
Dr Randeep Guleria, the head of All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), is reportedly heading the team that's preparing the list.
According to the National Family Health Survey-4 (2015-2016), about 6 percent of women and 8 percent of men in India are likely to have high blood sugar, a major and common risk factor for diabetes, as reported by the daily.
The same survey identified the prevalence of hypertension among Indian males to be around 13.6 percent, while it was 8.8 percent among the female population.