KOLKATA: The Covid vaccination drive in Bengal has begun to pick up pace once again with over 2.
5 lakh doses being administered on Friday.
With this, Bengal crossed the milestone of administering 1 crore first doses.
According to the Co-Win dashboard, a total of 1,01,14,162 people have received their first dose of vaccine since the drive started on January 16 and 38,51,939 got both their doses.
With two more corporate hospitals in Kolkata—Rabindranath Tagore International Institute of Cardiac Sciences (RTIICS) and Fortis Hospital Anandapur—resuming their vaccination drive on Friday and many others expected to re-launch the programme by next week, health officials hope the drive would gain further momentum.
The state health secretary, Narayan Swaroop Nigam, also facilitated a meeting between private hospitals and Serum Institute of India on Friday so that vaccine procurement process could be accelerated.
After procuring 50,000 Covishield doses on Thursday night, RTIICS resumed its inoculation drive by Friday afternoon, when it administered around 650 doses of the vaccine.
“Around 90% of the first-dose recipients on the first day of the relaunch were between 18 and 44 years.
Thirty of those who got their second doses were our employees.
Initially, we would concentrate on on-site vaccination for a few days, but will start off-site programmes soon.
We will begin the procurement process for the next lot very soon,” said R Venkatesh, zonal director (east), Narayana Health.
Fortis Hospital Anandapur, which has procured 40,000 doses of Covishield and17,000 Covaxin, started off its vaccination drive from its hospital as well as at camps in five housing apartments.
Around 2,500 people were inoculated by them on Friday.
“From Monday, we plan to open a vaccination centre at our Minto Park facility so that we can reach out to more people,” said Richa Singh Debgupta, chief of strategy and operations at Fortis Healthcare.
AMRI Hospitals is also expected to get around 1 lakh Covishield doses and another consignment of Covaxin vials next week.
So far, only Dhakuria and Mukundapur units have been carrying out the drive with limited Covaxin doses.
“We plan an extensive vaccination drive from next week as we expect to procure a good number of vials in a couple of days.
Apart from our hospital, we will be going to 120 corporates and associations.
Also, we will have a community vaccination centre as the Salt Lake stadium,” said Rupak Barua, group CEO, AMRI Hospitals.
“We should get about 20,000 Covishield doses by Tuesday.
We will start our drive the very next day,” said Simmerdeep Gill, COO CK Birla Hospitals CMRI.
Peerless Hospital is also expecting its order by the first week of June.
Covid: West Bengal crosses 1 crore first dose mark
