In what is being considered a step towards the rolling out of the COVID-19 vaccine, the government is set to conduct a dry run in four states - Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Gujarat, Punjab over two days of December 28 and 29.
These mock drills or dry runs will follow all the steps as if an actual vaccine was being administered. From registration, assisting vaccine takers to the waiting room and administering a mock vaccine to doing the necessary steps towards cold storage, transportation and observing for any adverse effects -- the dry run includes all the steps.
The move is towards assessing the feasibility of the operational guidelines chalked by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare before a vaccine is approved to be administered to 30 crore citizens in the country. The Ministry on December 12 released a 100-page document with all the guidelines that should be followed to ensure that the 30 crore citizens receive the vaccine smoothly and that they will also be informed about and observed for any adverse effects after immunisation.
India has received requests from Serum Institute of India's Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, Bharat Biotech's indigenous vaccine, and Pfizer-BioNTech's mRNA vaccine for emergency use authorisation. Before it approves any vaccine, it is conducting these dry runs to ensure that when the vaccine is available, there are no operational issues in the way.
The four states have been chosen to cater to all the four geographical areas of the country. Each State has to select two districts and five different settings such as district hospital, CHC/PHC, urban site, private health facility, rural outreach to reduce the bridge between planning and implementation.
To facilitate smooth implementation, close to 50,000 trainers and vaccinators have already been trained. Furthermore, this exercise will help in identifying any kinks or on-field issues with the digital platform Co-WIN which has specifically been designed to cater to the COVID-19 vaccination needs of registration, maintenance, and status updation of the beneficiaries. This centralised management information system will help in updating real time data and provide all the necessary information to the vaccinators as well as the beneficiaries.
The government believes that these eight pilot sessions across the four states will provide the vaccinators a hands-on experience to deal with any problems that could arise during the actual vaccine administration process. These mock drills will stage every event beginning from registration, assisting the recipients to the waiting room, maintaining the cold storage and transportation, administering a mock vaccine to the beneficiaries, and observing them for any adverse effects so that they can be managed effectively.
The vaccinators will also get to use the Co-WIN application for data entry, data verification, and reporting of the successful administration of the vaccine with dates for the second dosage as well as reporting for any adverse events. A separate team will monitor the ongoing at each of the centres and give the requisite feedback to the State and Union Health Ministry.
In the first phase, the government intends to vaccinate over one crore health workers, two crore frontline workers, and over 27 crore age and co-morbidity prioritized groups. The present cold chain system consisting of 85,634 equipment for storage of vaccine at about 28,947 cold chain points across the country will be used for the cold chain administration as the vaccines need to be kept at specific temperatures. Along with maintaining the vaccines under Mission Indhradhanush, the flagship immunisation program of the country, the current cold chain is capable of storing additional quantity of Covid-19 vaccine required for the first 3 Crore health and frontline workers