Covid-19 vaccination drive to begin from January 16 in India
The Centre said on Saturday the Covid-19 vaccination drive would begin in the country on January 16, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed as a “landmark step”, when nearly 30 million healthcare and frontline workers will be inoculated. Moments after the Centre’s announcement of the date, PM Modi tweeted about the people who will be inoculated on priority.
“After the detailed review, it was decided that in view of the forthcoming festivals including Lohri, Makar Sankranti, Pongal, Magh Bihu etc., the vaccination will start from 16th January 2021,” the release said.
During the meeting, PM Modi was briefed about the preparedness status of the Centre in close collaboration with states and UTs for rolling out vaccine doses in near future and was also informed about the Co-WIN mobile application. Co-WIN is a digitised platform that will provide real-time information of vaccine stocks, storage temperature and individualised tracking of beneficiaries of the vaccine. More than 7.9 million beneficiaries have been registered on the app.
The release pointed out that over 61,000 program managers, 200,00 vaccinators and 370,000 other vaccination team members have been trained so far as part of the training at the states, districts and block levels.
India has registered over 10.43 million Covid-19 disease cases till now of which 150,798 people have lost their lives. The active cases continue to remain below the 300,000-mark while the recoveries are over 10 million and constitute 96.41 per cent of the total caseload.
