PUNE: Private vaccination sites have more than doubled in the city, the figure on Friday being 28, in a few days with facilities such as Bharati Hospital, Deoyani Multispeciality, Apollo Clinic and Poona Hospital also starting the drive.
Hospital representatives said second doses for Covishield recipients in the 45+ age group were yet to fully start after the gap between two doses was increased to 12-16 weeks.
The private hospitals in the city are daily inoculating an average of 3,000-4,000 citizens in the younger group since the last few days, while the number crossed 8000 on Friday, district vaccination data showed.
Dr Sidram K Raut, director of Noble Hospitals, told TOI, “We are opening 300-400 slots per day.
Around 40% slots are for the 45+ category.
Vaccinations for them started from April.
Many in this category still have some time before their second jabs.
The private facilities continue to have limited doses.
We recently got the first lot of 5,120 doses of Covaxin and will start inoculating people in the 18-44 category with first doses from Saturday.
” Dr Jitendra Oswal, deputy medical director at Bharati Hospital, told TOI, “We re-started the drive on Thursday with 300 Covishield slots, which we increased to 500 on Friday.
” Bharati Hospital recently received 12,000 Covishield doses and plans to open 500 vaccination slots everyday, including Sundays.
“As soon as we upload sessions for the 18-44 years category, 400 appointments are booked within 15-30 seconds.
This again may be due to the use of vaccine tracking programmes like scripts or bots,” he said.
Vinod Sawantwadkar, CEO of Jehangir Hospital, Pune , said, “We recently started a drive to vaccinate Larsen & Toubro Infotech employees.
Over 5,000 employees, including their families, will be vaccinated over the next few days.
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