Over 5 million registrations on Co-WIN in two days, no glitches: R S Sharma

Going forward, people would be allowed to book slots online depending upon capacity of hospitals

The Co-WIN portal, the backbone of covid vaccination drive in the country, has seen more than 5 million registrations in the last two days, R S Sharma, chairman of the empowered group on vaccination told reporters on Tuesday. Stressing that there were no glitches with the Co-WIN portal, Sharma said that going forward people would be allowed to book slots online depending upon the capacity of the hospitals.

Around 15 million people have received at least one dose of vaccine so far and more than 200,000 doses have been given to citizen beneficiaries those above 60 years and over 45 with comorbidities.

Currently, Co-WIN provides forenoon and afternoon slots to beneficiaries which causes crowding on vaccination centres.

“Co-WIN 2.0 has done away with 9am to 5pm vaccination sessions. If a hospital has the capacity, then the system permits holding vaccination sessions beyond 5pm,” Rajesh Bhushan, health secretary said.

Many users complained they didn’t get the OTP while others weren’t able to see their names on the list on the CO-WIN website after the launch of the new version on Monday. Hospitals too said that the system was extremely slow in uploading the data of each beneficiary.

Sharma said that there were glitches in the earlier version of Co-WIN launched on January 16 and they rectified. He said that many users went searching for a Co-WIN app which does not exist and therefore faced issues.

He added however, the new version has a demand driven approach and that scalability of Co-WIN is a concern. “We see no problem in scaling up. It should be able to take a huge amount of load...The number of  transactions will be large...We also want data to be safe and secure.”  

As India’s vaccination drive now reaches the general public, health ministry said that 50 million doses and 4.6 million vials of vaccine had so far been moved around the country. “It has been a huge and complex logistical challenge,” Bhushan added.  

There are four union government’s medical store departments in the country, 60 consignee points and 29,000 cold chain points across the states.  In many places, such as between Itanagar to Guwahati the vaccine has to take a seven hour long road journey on a reefer truck to reach the vaccination centres.

Even as vaccination kicks off, the government is concerned over rising cases in Maharashtra, Kerala, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Haryana. Government feels that the recent surge has not been caused by any of the new mutations. “Many states have seen the wedding season, big parties where large numbers of people have gathered which could have caused the increase,” V K Paul, member-Health, NITI Aayog said.

Utilise pvt hospitals: Centre to states

The Centre has directed the states to utilise 100 per cent capacity of private hospitals functioning as Covid-19 vaccination centres. 

In the first two days of the latest vaccination drive, only private hospitals empanelled under Ayushman Bharat, Central Government Health Scheme (CGHS), and State Health Insurance were designated as vaccination centres. 

However, the government on Tuesday directed states to utilise all the private hospitals for the vaccination drive. The decision was communicated to states in a high-level meeting chaired by the Union health secretary and chairman of Empowered Group on Vaccine Administration.