India concludes two-day trial run of Covid-19 vaccination drive

India today successfully wrapped up a two-day dry run of the Covid-19 vaccination drive that will cover an estimated 30 crore people in the first phase including health workers, frontline workers and people above the age of 50.

The two-day end-to-end trial run was undertaken in eight districts across four states Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Punjab and Assam.

The actual vaccination campaign is likely to commence sometime later this month, official sources said.

For the trial run, specific teams were formed for various tasks by the district administration and activities like uploading dummy vaccination beneficiary's data, session site creation, communication of vaccination details to vaccinators and beneficiaries were carried out during the mock drill, reports our New Delhi correspondent.

Field feedback on the first day of the dry run was reviewed on December 29 through video conferencing with State and district programme officers by Joint Secretary (Public Health) and all states expressed satisfaction in terms of operational approach and use of IT platform to ensure transparency and effective monitoring of the vaccination processes.

Additional suggestions on IT platform were also noted for further enhancement of Co-WIN platform.

Detailed insights and feedback obtained during the dry run would help enrich the operational guidelines and IT platform and will strengthen the Covid-19 vaccination roll-out plan, the Health Ministry said in a statement.

The dry run exercise was aimed at end-to-end testing of Covid-19 vaccination process and get insights on any gaps or bottle-necks during actual conduct of vaccination.

The completion of the dry run came on a day when India's daily new Covid-19 cases touched a six-month low with less than 16,500 fresh cases being added to the overall national tally, the Health Ministry said today.

With the rising recoveries from the disease and a decline in daily new cases, India's cumulative recoveries are inching closer to 1 crore, the Ministry said. The total recovered cases have crossed 98 lakh.