The commencement of the dry run of the Coronavirus vaccine is about to begin in the nation today across all of the states and union territories. The programme is to be conducted in three locations at least in the state capitals. The first round has already been conducted in Punjab, Gujarat, Assam, and Andhra Pradesh previously on 28-29 December.
The Union Health Ministry states that “the of the dry run for Covid-19 vaccine introduction is to assess operational feasibility in the use of Covid Vaccine Intelligent Network (Co-WIN) application in the field environment, to test the linkages between planning and implementation and to identify the challenges and guide the way forward prior to the actual implementation.”
What is a dry run?
A dry run is carried out to test the proposed operations and the placed mechanisms for Covid-19 vaccination in any state. It will serve you the understandings of any congestion so that those are handled before the actual vaccination drive is commenced.
There will be an online platform served for the monitoring of vaccine delivery, the receipt for testing, and allotment. It will also manage the proper deployment of teams, pseudo training of assembly sites with the test recipients. It will also be test times for the vaccine cold storage and transportation facilities, how the crowd will be managed following the norms of social distancing.
Conduction of programme
The government has trained the members who will be administering this initiation of vaccine dry run. It will include several managers and handlers of vaccines like medical officers, supervisors, ASHA, cold chain handlers, and many more. Over 2300 personals were trained for the handling during the national-level training. More than 680 districts have trained their medical officers as per the operational guidelines. The state-level training is also done with more than 7000 district level trainees.