COVID-19 vaccination dry run held in Maharashtra

A dry run to assess the readinessof the mechanism laid out for the imminent COVID-19immunisation drive, was conducted across 32 of the total 36districts in Maharashtra on Friday, a health departmentofficial said.

A similar exercise had been conducted in four otherdistricts of the state- Nagpur, Jalna, Pune and Nandurbar- onJanuary 2.

Health Minister Rajesh Tope said the mock drill onFriday was held at 114 centres across the state as part of thenationwide exercise.

''Except for the four districts where the dry run wasconducted earlier, rest others took part in the drill today,''he said.

Twenty-five persons were given dummy vaccine at eachcentre, he said, adding that the facilities where the exercisewas held included municipal hospitals and district as well assub-district hospitals. Each volunteer's finger was inked forparticipating in the process.

''There are still some areas in the overall systemwhere we need to improve efficiency in terms of data updation,delivery of SMS and training the local staff for inoculation,''he said.

''Today's exercise will give an idea about how seriousthe problems are. We will have the data of all the areas wherewe are facing issues, so that we can fix them before theactual vaccination process begins,'' the minister added.

The state needs to reduce the loopholes in the systemto avoid inconvenience to people, Tope said.

The Union Health Ministry had earlier said that thedry run for COVID-19 vaccination was aimed at testing thelinkages between planning and implementation and to identifythe challenges.

It had said that the objective of the dry run was toassess the operational feasibility in the use of Co-WINapplication in field environment, to test the linkages betweenplanning and implementation and to identify the challenges andguide way forward prior to actual implementation.

The dry run would also equip the administration of thestates and union territories in management of vaccine supply,storage and logistics including cold chain management, it hadsaid.