People with co-morbidities will be able to register themselves for vaccination following which their medical history will be checked.
With three vaccine-makers, including Pfizer, having applied for emergency use authorisation of their vaccine candidates in India, the vaccination drive is likely to begin shortly. The health ministry on Tuesday revealed details of how the entire vaccination programme will be conducted, though no date has been made public so far. Addressing a press meet on Tuesday, health secretary Rajesh Bhushan said the Centre has created an application which will monitor the process from the beginning to the end. Co-WIN, the new app which will be available for free download, is an upgraded version of the Electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network (eVIN).
Here is all you need to know about the app
> This app will be useful for all those engaged in the process — administrators, vaccinators and people who are going to receive these vaccine shots.
> The government will be vaccinating priority groups in the first two phases: frontline workers including all healthcare professionals in the first stage and emergency workers in the second stage. While the data of these people are already being compiled by the state governments, from the third stage onwards where people with co-morbidity will be given vaccines, self-registration will be introduced. And that will happen through the Co-WIN app.
> There are five modules in Co-WIN app: Administrator module, registration module, vaccination module, beneficiary acknowledgement module and report module. Reports said each vaccination will take at least 30 minutes and only 100 people will be administered in each session.
> The administrator module is for the administrators who will be conducting these vaccination sessions. Through this module, they can create sessions and the respective vaccinators and managers will be notified.
> Registration module is for people to get registered for vaccination. It will upload bulk data on co-morbidity provided by local authorities or by surveyors.
> The vaccination module will verify beneficiary details and update vaccination status.
> Beneficiary acknowledgement module will send SMS to beneficiaries. It will also generate QR-based certificates after one gets vaccinated.
> Report module will prepare reports of how many vaccine sessions have been conducted, how many people have attended those, how many people have dropped out etc.
> The app will also send real-time data of the temperature of the cold-storage units to the main server.
“Every single India who needs to be vaccinated will be vaccinated, which roughly includes one crore healthcare workers, two crore frontline workers and 27 crore of prioritised age groups,” Rajesh Bhushan said on Tuesday quoting the proposal of the National Expert Group on Vaccine Administration. “It is to be noted that the government will take a final call on this and these stages may not be sequential. Depending on the availability of the vaccines, these can go on simultaneously,” the secretary said.
Both Serum Institute of India which is producing Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine and Bharat Biotech, which is producing the first indigenous vaccine, have approached the regulator for emergency use licence. Pfizer India was, however, the first one to approach the Drugs Controller General of India for a licence after the United Kingdom and Bahrain gave the nod to the vaccine candidate.
