Pune civic body to start Covid-19 vaccination for frontline workers, civic staff to be first beneficiaries

Since Wednesday as of Saturday, 1,046 frontline workers have been vaccinated with Covishield or Covaxin

Five days after the Pune rural and Pimpri Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) started the Covid-19 vaccination drive for frontline workers (FLWs) registered in its jurisdiction, Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) will start the vaccination for FLWs registered in the city. There are over 65,000 registered FLWs from Pune city on the Co-Win app.

Earlier the vaccination sites were restricted by the government of Maharashtra but now with more sites available, the PMC would begin the vaccination drive for its FLWs too. (Ravindra Joshi/HT PHOTO)

The district administration first started that Covid-19 vaccination for frontline workers on Wednesday, February 3, at Aundh hospital when 67 FLWs got vaccinated.

The city will see the vaccination drive for FLWs begin from Monday at two of the civic body-run hospitals namely Rajiv Gandhi hospital and Kamala Nehru hospital. Frontline workers include police officials, armed forces, disaster management volunteers, municipal workers, home guards, and civil defence organisations and prison staff.

Since Wednesday as of Saturday, 1,046 frontline workers have been vaccinated with Covishield or Covaxin. FLWs are included in the phase one nationwide Covid-19 vaccination drive in the country.

PMC health chief, Dr Ashish Bharti said, “We have to start the vaccination for FLWs which will begin from Monday. We will start from at least two centres at two of our hospitals. We will start first with PMC sanitation workers and other civic body workers and then eventually with police personnel and PMPML staff who will be followed later. Depending on the response in the beginning, we will go ahead with the FLWs vaccination. We will have to follow the same process that we did for healthcare workers that is sending SMS and calls to the registered beneficiaries for FLWs too.

However, for HCWs, we could call the respective hospital staff which is on duty and achieve the vaccination target. However, in case of FLWs, we are not sure of the attendance because they would not be at the same place and so we will start with these two sites first.”

He further added that for HCWs the session sites had to be created as per the pin code and assuming that most of these FLWs live in the city areas of Shivajinagar and Pune stations, they will have to create the sites accordingly. Earlier the vaccination sites were restricted by the government of Maharashtra but now with more sites available, the PMC would begin the vaccination drive for its FLWs too.