Covid-19 Vaccinations To Start In 139 Centres

The much-awaited Covid-19 vaccination drive will be launched from 139 centres across Telangana on Saturday.

The Telangana government had received the first consignment of 3.72 lakh doses of the Covid-19 vaccine Covishield, developed by the Pune-based Serum Institute, on Tuesday, January 12. The batch had been stored at a 40-cubic-metre vaccine cooler with the capacity to hold 1.5 crore vaccines, in Koti.

The vaccine will be administered to 30 people at each centre on the first day, which will take the total number of people being inoculated to 4,170.

Following this, only the government employees in the state will receive the shot through the coming week. The employees of the government and private hospitals will then be vaccinated in a phased manner.

The state government has already made elaborate arrangements for the dispensation of the vaccine, and has also undertaken the process of transporting the vaccine in special containers to all the vaccination centres.

It has also issued instructions to the relevant authorities to depute senior doctors to all the vaccine centres.

The officials will also monitor the process of controlling reactions in all the vaccinated persons. A total of 570 beds in the ICUs of 57 hospitals have been kept aside especially to provide any emergency treatment required by the vaccination drive's beneficiaries.

The TRS government has been actively involved in facilitating the upcoming immunisation drive in the state. It conducted a dry run for the administration of the vaccine recently. Chief Secretary Somesh Kumar also held a review meeting with the state's district Collectors to scrutinise the preparations for the same, on January 12.

The Centre, too, has been taking steps to ease the pan-India immunisation drive. It had mandated that all the states and UTs organise dry runs for the vaccine administration. Now Prime Minister Narendra Modi will reportedly interact with the beneficiaries of the vaccine who were immunised at the Gandhi Hospital and the Narsingi Hospital during the recent dry run in conducted in the state.