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Mass vaccination takes on a completely different meaning when it comes to a country with 1.3 billion inhabitants. However, India has previously carried out gigantic vaccination campaigns against polio and measles. And every five years, the country organizes parliamentary elections that take place without major incident, although the elections are held in several rounds for just over a month.
Election officials, in particular, are expected to play an important role in the logistical planning of the vaccination program. Additionally, tens of thousands of volunteers will be trained to help with the vaccination itself.
According to the government of New Delhi 300 million people will participate in the first round. The priority groups are medical personnel, the army, the police and all volunteers. Furthermore, 270 million people are considered to be particularly vulnerable, including those over 50 years of age.
The vaccination program is expected to start in March. There is a persistent rumor that big cities should be vaccinated before hundreds of thousands of rural villages, but the country’s health minister has repeatedly denied this. The idea is that all states are included in the first round.
The great challenge is the cold storage capacity and logistics. The purchase of transportation is an apparatus almost as extensive as the purchase of at least two billion doses of vaccine. Since several of the vaccines must be stored at low temperatures, India must invest large resources to improve the cooling capacity.
However, India has the advantage of being the world’s largest producer of medicines and vaccines. The Astra Zeneca vaccine will be produced by the Serum Institute of India for the Indian market.
Saturday passed the number of confirmed cases is 10 million, according to the Johns Hopkins compilation. India is the country with the highest number of infections in the world after the United States. However, relative to population size, India is far down the list.
The spread of the infection has slowed significantly in recent weeks. In September, the number of new cases exceeded 100,000 and per day, it is now about 25,000. On Saturday, India reported as many new cases as Britain, whose population is 20 times smaller.
Despite the fact that tens of millions of Indians live in crowded slums, the country has escaped with relative ease. Some explanations are considered the young population of the country and the warm climate.
During the pandemic, more than 145,000 people were reported to have died from COVID-19 in India, less than half of the number in the United States.
