The central government on Thursday conducted a high-level meeting with states and union territories to review the progress of vaccination in the light of the revised guidelines for implementation of National Covid Vaccination Program and recent advisories. In the meeting chaired by Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan, the states were asked to focus on second dose coverage among healthcare workers and frontline workers.
The Union Health Secretary also highlighted the low vaccination coverage among healthcare workers and frontline workers, especially for the second dose, and termed it as a “cause of serious concern”.
He reiterated that universal coverage and full protection amongst this group is crucial to protect healthcare response to pandemic and timely completion of vaccination schedule is important for conferring full protection to beneficiaries.
According to an official release, Bhushan also highlighted less than adequate private sector participation in the Covid19 vaccination drive to the states or inion territories. “As per the revised guidelines, 25 per cent of the vaccine stock can be procured by the private hospitals which can set up private CVCs for supplementing the government’s efforts in further universalisation of the vaccination drive. Limited presence of private hospitals and their unequal spread were highlighted for Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal, Assam, etc,” it added.
Meanwhile, the states were also informed of the modifications of CoWIN platform aimed to make it more effective as a backend management tool for the countrywide coronavirus vaccination drive. These modifications are:
• Rectifications can be done in the personal information (Name, YOB, Gender and Photo ID number of the card used) by the citizens requesting changes only in any of the two fields out of the four mentioned. These changes are allowed only once. Once updated the old certificate will be deleted and it will not be possible to reverse the changes.
• Change in vaccine type, date of vaccination, vaccination events particular not recorded in Co-WIN can be made with the help of District Immunization Officers (DIO)s. These changes can’t be done by users themselves but users have to request the DIO.
• A feature to tag the existing CVCs as Urban and Rural is also being provided.
The states were also informed of the vaccine utilization feature. The DIOs are allowed to edit/update the Vaccine Utilisation Reports (VURs) submitted by the vaccinators and make corrections, if needed. The States/Union Territories were asked to thoroughly train the vaccinators and DIOs to prevent data entry errors, said the government.
The states were further informed that the CoWIN platform is now available in 12 languages and is equipped to register UDID unique disability ID card as well. It was also pointed that accounts now can be blocked for 24 hours if greater than 1,000 searches are done in 50 login sessions of 15 minutes each.
The government also said that the states can offer walk-in registrations for age group above 45 sessions if onsite capacity is greater than 0. Walk-in sessions for the 18-44 age group can also be organised if “onsite-dose 2″ capacity is greater than 0. States were advised to widely publicise about this at the CVCs.
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Source: News18