At a vaccination centre in Darya Ganj. (Express photo by Praveen Khanna) The Covid vaccination drive of three lakh healthcare workers and six lakh frontline workers in Delhi is expected to be completed by March, senior officials from the state health department said Wednesday, adding that the number of vaccination centres in the city will be increased to 225 by the end of next week.
Delhi government has set a target of 1,000 centres to inoculate 1 lakh persons per day, according to official documents, which state that 1,100 teams will be required to carry out the drive.
Dr Suneela Garg, who has been appointed to the state Covid task force, said each centre will administer the vaccine to 100 beneficiaries a day. The number of centres has been reduced from 89 to 75 on launch day as the session sites for the entire country have been reduced from 5,000 to 2,934.
“This means 7,500 beneficiaries will be vaccinated on the first day. So, in the next 10 days, we will be able to cover 75,000 beneficiaries under the programme. The target is to inoculate the healthcare and frontline workers in the first phase by the end of March. Once that is done, we will start the vaccination drive for the population above 50 years and below 50 years of age with comorbidities,” said Dr Garg.
While the drive will begin on Saturday at 75 centres, the efforts will be scaled up over the next few days, with district magistrates being directed to identify sites to set up vaccination camps.
“Once we have 1,000 vaccination centres, we will administer vaccines to one lakh people a day,” said Dr Garg. Healthcare workers will be registered through the CoWin app developed by the Centre and their names will be verified at session sites. As per the plan, healthcare workers will be given the shot in their respective institutes from where their names have been registered for the drive.
As per the chart prepared by the government, the south west district will have the maximum such centres (123) while north east, with 65, will have the least. It shows that the central district has the highest number of healthcare (34,653) as well as frontline workers (69,306).
North east district, which has the lowest concentration of government health facilities, has 4,737 healthcare workers and 9,474 frontline workers. In terms of people aged 50 and above and those below 50 with comorbidities, southwest leads the chart with 5.38 lakh and 5.91 lakh persons in these categories respectively.
Meanwhile, the Delhi government’s Rajiv Gandhi Super Speciality hospital (RGSSH) received 20,000 doses of Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin Wednesday, a day after the city received its first batch of Oxford Covid-19 vaccine Covishield, manufactured by the Serum Institute of India.
Dr Chhavi Gupta, spokesperson of the hospital, said: “There are four boxes containing 250 vials in each box. Each vial has 20 doses of 10 ml. We have started the process of transportation of the vaccines to the respective centres.”