Covid-19 vaccination in India: Dry run starts today to test systems

New Delhi, Jan 01: Barely days away from the roll-out of a Covid-19 vaccine in India, a mock drill of the Covid-19 vaccination drive will be conducted across all states and Union Territories on Saturday, as per the central government order. The exercise is aimed at testing the preparedness for the vaccine rollout.

Union health minister Harsh Vardhan chaired a high-level meeting to review preparedness at various session sites in the country for coronavirus vaccination trial run on January 2.

The government has already successfully earlier conducted a two-day pilot Covid-19 vaccination drive in four states - Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab and Gujarat on December 28-29. But today's dry run is more ambitious in scope, as it is covering all state capitals.

The government will be vaccinating priority groups in the first two phases: frontline workers including all healthcare professionals in the first stage and emergency workers in the second stage. While the data of these people are already being compiled by the state governments, from the third stage onwards where people with co-morbidity will be given vaccines, self-registration will be introduced. And that will happen through the Co-WIN app.

The app will have separate modules for administrator, registration, vaccination, beneficiary acknowledgment and reports.

Once people start to register for the app, the platform will upload bulk data on co-morbidity provided by local authorities.

The CO-WIN app is yet to be available for smartphone users and it is expected that it will be publicly available soon.

The different modules of the platform cater to the entire process of COVID-19 vaccination starting from registration to verification.

What is dry run?

Dry run is essentially a practice session where a sample number of beneficiaries will go through a mock immunisation process.

Vaccine dry run is an end-to-end exercise where all steps to be done during the actual vaccination drive will be tested to identify if there is any gap in the process or if any region of the country is experiencing any difficulty in the entire process.