CHENNAI: The city corporation vaccinated 1.83 lakh city residents on Sunday, as part of its Covid-19 mega vaccination drive. It had enough facilities to vaccinate 3.5 lakh beneficiaries. Most camps were met with good response from residents, and had streamlined registration, waiting and vaccination systems.
“I brought my parents for their second dose of Covishield. We completed vaccinations for both within 10-15 minutes,” said Sreejesh, a resident of Karthikeyapuram in Perungudi zone who visited the
camp at the King’s School in Madipakkam.
Data entry operators registered details on the CoWIN application through their mobile phones and medical officers were on standby in these camps. “Since it was a Sunday, not many people walked in initially but after 9:30-10 am, people started coming.
In some cases, we even had to extend forenoon timings until noon when we had originally planned to close at 11 am,” said a corporation staff who did not want to be named. The civic body conducted 1,600 camps in total with two static camps and six mobile camps in each ward. While vaccination was made easy, unavailability of Covaxin remained an issue in some zones like Perungudi and Madhavaram.
At the Mapdipakkam urban primary healthcare centre, residents who walked in for Covaxin, even for second doses, were turned away. Officials said that they were trying to get fresh stock coordinating with other zones.
“We thought at least for second doses, we would get priority since we received an SMS saying that our second dose was due. But there was no stock. They’ve taken down our names and numbers and have promised to make them available by tomorrow,” said Selvavinayagam, a resident of Periyar Nagar.
For Sunday, the city corporation had in place 400 vaccine carriers, pulse oxymeters, thermal scanners, sanitisers, biomedical waste boxes and 3.5 lakh auto-disable syringes each. The camps went on from 7 am to 7 pm on Sunday and were held near parks, malls, bus stands, railway stations and other public spaces apart from residential areas.