Union health secretary Rajesh Bhushan reviewed the status and progress of COVID19 vaccination with health secretaries and the managing directors of the National Health Mission of states and UTs through video conference.
Secretary Bhushan during a review meeting on Saturday appreciated the creditworthy performance of all states and UTs on COVID19 vaccination.
Elaborating on the global landmarks crossed by India, he underlined that India is the fastest country to reach the 5 million mark in COVID19 vaccination in just 21 days.
Several other countries, which have had a head start, some as much as 60 days, have taken a longer time to reach this target, he said.
The health secretary urged the states and UTs to exponentially increase the pace of vaccination.
States and UTs asked to improve the momentum and accelerate the coverage as the country moves forward with the COVID19 vaccination drive.
It was pointed that there remains a substantial scope for improvement in the number of average vaccinations per vaccination session. The State Health Secretaries were asked to analyze the daily variation in the number of average vaccinations and take necessary steps to increase them.
States and UTs were advised to ensure 100 percent saturation of people who have already been registered on CoWin digital platform.
They were also asked to organize simultaneous vaccination sessions per day in the health facility wherever possible. Each State/UT was advised to devise a state-specific strategy to achieve this target.
While there are 12 States and UTs that have achieved 60% or more vaccination coverage of healthcare workers, they were all advised to improve the percentage coverage of vaccinated beneficiaries as there are many states and UTs that need to improve their performance on this parameter.
States/ UTs were advised to ensure regular review meetings of the State, District and Block Task Force to assess the emerging challenges, understand the ground issues and promptly address them at the appropriate levels.
“Every state and UTs must schedule all healthcare workers for vaccination at least once before February 20 and immediately thereafter organize mop-up rounds for them.”
“Similarly, all frontline workers must be scheduled for vaccination at least once before 6th March 2021 and immediately thereafter organize mop-up rounds for them.”
“The failure of potential beneficiaries to get vaccinated in the mop-up round would automatically push them to the age-appropriate vaccination category,” said Bhushan.
The second dose of the vaccine is also scheduled to be administered from February 13 for people, who were vaccinated on Jan 16.
He further stated that the CoWIN 2.0 version will also be released soon.