SAS Nagar/Chandigarh: January 8: As the Nation inches towards its mammoth Covid-19 vaccination programme, Punjab is all prepared to administer the vaccination as and when it is received, informed Balbir Singh Sidhu, Health Minister Punjab.
In an informal interaction with the media after the conduct of vaccination dry-run at District Hospital, phase 6 Mohali, Health Minister informed that Vaccination Dry-Run has been successful statewide with requisite men and material in place. “All logistics have been worked out and we are good to go,” said he. Simulation of the entire inoculation process was conducted; staff has been familiarized with all the aspects of the actual administration of the vaccine. The operational aspects have been thoroughly reviewed and feasibility of CoWIN Portal has been monitored.
As of now we have 1000 trained vaccinators and as many as four supporting team members per vaccinator are ready for the job. “As of now State is equipped enough to administer 4 lac doses of vaccine per day,” informed the HM.
He informed that vaccine would be administered only with the consent of the pre-registered recipient/beneficiary and in the first phase of vaccination, 1.6 lakh Health Care Workers (HCWs) from private and public facilities would be inoculated followed by frontline corona warriors including police, revenue officials and other field staff and subsequently the elderly and population with co-morbidities.
The Minister informed that he is in touch with Union Health Minister and he took up the issue to provide COVID vaccine free of cost to all states.
In run up to almost final allocation of corona vaccine, the Punjab Government today successfully completed the dry run in all the session sites constituted in district hospitals, medical colleges/private health facilities and urban/rural outreach centres. The dosing schedule as per the preliminary information involves two doses per beneficiary/recipient with the second dose at an interval of 28 days from the first. Every beneficiary will have to wait for 30 minutes in an observation room after getting inoculated for monitoring of adverse events following immunization (AEFI), if any
The Health Minister said that as many as 25 Beneficiaries, 5 member vaccination team and a supervisor per session site, participated in the mock drill as per micro-plan finalized for the program so as to ensure the smooth run of all activities as per SOPs.
