CHENNAI: A
dry run for the first stage of the campaign to vaccinate more than five lakh healthcare workers against novel coronavirus began at 17 sites in
Tamil Nadu on Saturday morning. The dry run, a part of the national campaign for the
vaccination, is being held in Chennai, the Nilgiris, Tirunelveli, Coimbatore and Tiruvallur district.
The Directorate of Public Health has planned to complete 25 “dummy” vaccinations in two hours. During the dry run, officials will check the multiple steps of the vaccination process, efficiency of the exclusive vaccination network (CoWIN), internet connectivity and facilities in the observation room. At the end of the process, the public health department will send text messages for completion of the process along with date and time for the booster shot to those receiving vaccines and also update details on
CoWIN.
At 9.15am, the health department began the run with health workers at the Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital. Volunteers took separate exit and entry, wore masks throughout the process and maintained social distancing norms as per protocol. At entry, vaccinator 1 verifies the identity of the health worker and the vaccinator 2 makes an entry on the specialised vaccine app before sending the candidate into the vaccination room.
“No vaccine is given during the dry run. A nurse or a health worker will simply click on the ‘yes’ button on the CoWIN app, and an SMS will to those who receive the vaccine,” said health secretary J Radhakrishnan. T
The person who has been vaccinated would then be asked to wait in the observation room for half-an-hour. The health department has stocked all first aid and emergency medications in the observation hall.
At least 2,000 health workers were deployed for the dry-run. They include five vaccinators, one doctor, supervisory health officials and volunteers.
During the first phase of vaccination, health workers such as doctors, nurses and paramedics and frontline workers including police and uniformed service personnel will receive the vaccine. Following this, elderly and people with comorbidities will receive the vaccine.
The state has readied more than 47,000 vaccination sites and capacity to store 2.5crore vaccines. It has trained more than 21,000 health workers. Each centre will vaccinate not more than 100 people a day to avoid crowding.
Covid-19 has claimed more than 12,000 lives in Tamil Nadu.