With three vaccine manufacturers, including Pfizer, applying for an emergency use authorization in India, the vaccination campaign in India is likely to begin shortly. The Health Ministry revealed details of how the entire vaccination program will be carried out on Tuesday, although no date has been made public so far. Addressing a press meeting on Tuesday, Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan said the Center has created an app that will monitor the process from start to finish. Co-WIN, the new application that will be available for free download, is an enhanced version of the Electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network (eVIN).
This is all you need to know about the application.
> This application will be useful for everyone involved in the process: administrators, vaccinators and people who will receive these vaccines.
> The government will vaccinate priority groups in the first two phases: front-line workers, including all health professionals in the first phase, and emergency workers in the second phase. Although the data of these people is already being collected by the state governments, from the third stage in which people with comorbidity will be vaccinated, self-registration will be introduced. And that will happen through the Co-WIN app.
> There are five modules in the Co-WIN application: administrator module, registration module, vaccination module, beneficiary recognition module, and reporting module. Reports say that each vaccine will take at least 30 minutes and only 100 people will be given in each session.
> The administrator module is for administrators who will conduct these vaccination sessions. Through this module, they can create sessions and the respective vaccinators and managers will be notified.
> The registration module is for people to register for vaccination. It will upload massive data on comorbidity provided by local authorities or by surveyors.
> The vaccination module will verify the details of the beneficiaries and update the vaccination status.
> The beneficiary recognition module will send SMS to the beneficiaries. It will also generate QR-based certificates after one gets vaccinated.
> The reporting module will prepare reports of how many vaccination sessions have been done, how many people have attended them, how many people have dropped out, etc.
> The application will also send real-time data on the temperature of the cold rooms to the main server.
“Every India that needs to be vaccinated will be vaccinated, which includes approximately one crore of healthcare workers, two crore of frontline workers and a prioritized age group of 27 crore,” Rajesh Bhushan said Tuesday citing the proposal by the National Group of Experts on Vaccine Administration. “It should be noted that the government will take one last call on this and these stages may not be sequential. Depending on the availability of the vaccines, these can continue simultaneously ”, said the secretary.
Both the Serum Institute of India, which produces the Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine, and Bharat Biotech, which produces the first indigenous vaccine, have approached the regulator for an emergency use license. However, Pfizer India was the first to apply for the license from the Comptroller General of Drugs of India after the UK and Bahrain gave the go-ahead for the vaccine candidate.
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