Widen network, say experts as India aims to boost drive
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NEW DELHI: The government is planning to more than double the number of coronavirus vaccination centres and reach deeper into rural parts of the country, targeting a massive expansion that experts believe is possible only if policies are relaxed and India’s vast immunisation infrastructure is tapped into.
Government data shows 1.4 million doses were administered on Thursday, a record for the country, but a breakdown shows only about half of this number (700,000) was of people from the general public who became eligible to get doses on March 1. The remaining were health and frontline workers, who were the first in line to get doses when the drive began on January 16, and 330,000 were second booster shots.
The roughly 20,000 centres being used for the vaccine drive at the moment are hospitals, private as well as public, while many primary and secondary health centres at present are kept out of the programme.
The makers of the two vaccines India is using, Serum Institute of India (SII) and Bharat Biotech, told the Delhi high court on Thursday that they have excess stocks but supplies can be made available only upon permission of the Union government.
“Currently there are about 20,000 vaccination centres functional across the country, and the plan is to take it up to at least 50,000 and eventually it could even be 100,000. The numbers will automatically increase to reach closer to the target of 5 million vaccinations per day,” said Dr NK Arora, member, National Task Force on Covid-19 matters.
“The focus will be on adding more centres in smaller cities and rural areas as bigger cities already have adequate number of centres functioning. Also, not just increasing centres, the focus will also be on effective utilisation of existing centres. If you see, we have been able to utilise just about half of our capacity at the moment and that needs to be ramped up first,” said Arora.
In all, India has given about 18 million doses of Covaxin and Covishield to people in three priority groups: health care workers, frontline workers (such as police and military), and people above the age of 60 (or those older than 45 with a certain set of illnesses that raise their risk of death in Covid-19 infections).
Experts, however, say the pace is still significantly short of what India needs not only to cover its vast population of high risk