Countdown to Delhi vaccination begins with 2.6L doses landing

Countdown to Delhi vaccination begins with 2.6L doses landing

Alok K N Mishra & Sidhartha Roy

New Delhi:13.01.2021

After over 10 months of counting Covid-19 cases daily, the capital on Tuesday began to keep track of a new tally with 2.64 lakh doses of Covishield vaccine arriving at Delhi airport. Stored at the city’s largest and central Covid vaccine cold storage facility at Rajiv Gandhi Super Speciality Hospital in east Delhi, the vials will inject new hope into the fight against the pandemic from Saturday.

Starting with 8,900 healthcare workers, who are to be inoculated at 89 booths across the capital, the unprecedented campaign aims to vaccinate 2.25 lakh healthcare workers before moving on to other vulnerable groups and gradually widening the scope to cover people in the rest of the city.

The vials are protected by three security layers and have been stored at an optimal temperature (2 to 8o C). A cold van delivered 22 boxes of vaccines at the hospital with each box containing 12,000 doses.

Special flight brings vials to IGI

Delhi’s first vaccine consignment arrived on a SpiceXpress SG 8937 at IGI airport at 10.15am in specially packed airtight containers. The flights are capable of transporting extremely sensitive drugs, blood samples and vaccines in a controlled temperature range of -40o C to +25o C. P 3

Police set up ‘green corridor’

Delhi Police put in place a “green corridor” and deployed escort vehicles for the two containers from Delhi airport on Tuesday afternoon.“A distance of around 40km was covered in around 52 minutes,” joint commissioner of police (traffic) Manish Agrawal said. P 3

100 to be vaccinated a day at each booth

Each box has 1,200 vials and each vial contains 10 doses.

An official said the entire storage facility at the hospital is under 24x7 CCTV surveillance with Delhi Police personnel and the hospital’s own security staff standing guard.

The vaccine will be sent by the health & family welfare department in cold vans to over 89 cold chain points which are located near 89 vaccination booths where the drive will be launched. An official said the vaccine can be stored easily at the cold chain points for a long period. "For the booths located at the government facilities, the vials will be sent a day before Saturday while for the booths located at private hospitals, these will be sent on Saturday morning," said Dr Suneela Garg, director-professor and head of community medicine at Maulana Azad Medical College and a public health expert.

CM Arvind Kejriwal will kickstart the vaccination programme at a function at Lok Nayak Hospital. At each vaccination booth, only a 100 people will be vaccinated in a day.

Those who have enrolled for vaccination will receive text messages from the districts a day earlier mentioning date and time and address of the booth. The SMS and an identity card will be needed to be produced at the booth.

Each booth will have three rooms and will be guarded by Delhi Police and managed by civil defence volunteers. Verification of the credentials of the beneficiary will be done in the first room and entries will be made on the Co-WIN app. The person will then be inoculated in another room. The next stop will be the observation room where the beneficiary will have to stay for 30 minutes to guard against any adverse event.

Rajiv Gandhi Super Speciality Hospital was selected after the Centre wrote a letter to the Delhi government a few months ago asking for identifying a space of around 5,000 square metres. A team of the Union health ministry surveyed and approved the utility block after which the building was retrofitted.

"The modifications carried out included changing of existing doors so that the deep freezers for bulk storage could be brought in easily. More electricity points were also added and adequate power back-up arranged," said a gover nment official.

Delhi government has identified two more storage facilities. "We also have our existing facility at Battery Lane in north Delhi’s Civil Lines area as a secondary storage point and a third one has been identified at the office of the Directorate General of Health Services in Karkardooma in east Delhi. However, two storage facilities would be more than enough for our requirements and we have identified the third one in case the need arises," he said.

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VACCINE BOOTHS IDENTIFIED FOR DRIVE