Ghaziabad, GB Nagar achieve single-day highest vaccination coverage

Ghaziabad: The Ghaziabad and Gautam Budh Nagar districts on Thursday recorded their single-day highest vaccination coverage and also stood at second and third spot, respectively, for the highest number of doses administered across all 75 districts in the state

Ghaziabad: The Ghaziabad and Gautam Budh Nagar districts on Thursday recorded their single-day highest vaccination coverage and also stood at second and third spot, respectively, for the highest number of doses administered across all 75 districts in the state. Officials, however, said they are facing hiccups in procuring doses which could bring down the per-day vaccination coverage for the next two days.

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According to the Cowin portal, Uttar Pradesh administered 818,727 doses till 9.30pm on Thursday and the top three spots were occupied by Gorakhpur (31,944 doses) Ghaziabad (29,690 doses) and GB Nagar (27,251 doses).

“The 29,690 administered Thursday is one day highest number of jabs administered in the district. What is more encouraging is that about 95% of these doses were given at government centres. Our vaccination coverage has picked up ever since we started the ‘near to home’ project at six centres under the cluster vaccination scheme,” said Dr NK Gupta, chief medical officer of Ghaziabad.

Under the cluster vaccination scheme, several residential wards or villages have been identified in the form of a cluster and teams will take up vaccination of beneficiaries at a central location accessible to residents.

One of the major paid, private vaccination-centres at Cambridge School, set up by Max Hospital, in Ghaziabad’s Vaishali, has closed down due to low footfall after the on-spot registration was allowed at ‘near to home’ vaccination centres.

“We closed down as the footfall dipped to about 200-300 per day and it was not feasible for us to maintain the huge operating expenses. However, our other centre at the hospital site is still in operation,” said an official from the hospital, on condition of anonymity.

Short supply

Officials familiar with the matter said that Ghaziabad also faces the issue of short supply for the next two days as they have about 21,000 doses for Friday and about 11,000 for Saturday. This, they added, will bring down their daily vaccination coverage.

“We are trying to ensure that sufficient vaccine stock is made available to us on a regular basis to keep up the momentum,” Dr Gupta added. The six centres under the cluster scheme contributed 11,612 doses out of the total 29,690 administered in the district on Thursday.

In GB Nagar there are about 17,000 doses available for Friday.

“However, we will ensure that more stock arrives in due course. The figure of vaccination achieved on Thursday is the single day highest achieved by the district so far. About 25% of the coverage was seen through by the 25% private sector, while the rest was by government vaccination-centres. Starting July 1, we have planned to scale up our daily vaccinations to about 30,000 doses,” said Suhas LY, district magistrate of GB Nagar.

The UP chief minister has directed that more than 10 lakh doses per day be administered in the state from July 1. The state, on the day, will launch its cluster vaccination program in all areas of all the 75 districts in order to achieve full vaccination coverage for the state’s population by the end of this year.

“Our vaccination program is running at a fast pace and our cluster vaccination model is yielding encouraging results. For June, we had set a target of ten million doses. But we achieved the target on Thursday and still we have six more days left in the month, during which we will achieve more coverage,” said Amit Mohan Prasad, UP’s additional chief secretary (health).

He added that from June 21, when the cluster model was initiated, the state saw 700,000 to 800,000 doses being administered daily.