Covid-19 vaccination centres can now be found through Google

The tech giant expects to roll out the feature in the coming weeks.

Google India on Friday announced that to aid the world's largest vaccination drive it will be providing accurate information regarding Covid-19 vaccination centres on Google Search, Maps and Google Assistant. The tech giant expects to roll out the feature in the coming weeks.

The move comes as India in March entered its second phase of the vaccination drive where it is inoculating the elderly population and people between the age of 45-59 years with certain comorbidities. (ANI Photo)

The move comes as India in March entered its second phase of the vaccination drive where it is inoculating the elderly population and people between the age of 45-59 years with certain comorbidities.

"With vaccinations for the vulnerable population having commenced from 1st March in thousands of hospitals across the country, we are also working with the MoHFW and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to accurately surface the information on vaccination centres on Google Search, Maps and Google Assistant, and expect to roll this out in the coming weeks," Google India said on Friday.

Signifying the assistance of the company in the vaccination drive, Google said that as soon as the first phase of inoculation began, knowledge panels on its search engine were used to provide credible information, sourced from the ministry of health and family welfare(MoHFW), relating to the two coronavirus vaccines in the country (Covishield and Covaxin), the effectiveness of the vaccines safety, distribution, side effects and more in multiple Indian languages.

"These panels provide consolidated information such as details on the two vaccines, effectiveness, safety, distribution, side effects, and more, and is available in English and eight Indian languages (Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, and Hindi). This information is sourced from MoHFW, and provides answers to commonly asked questions, displays real-time statistics around vaccinations completed, and provides links to the MoHFW website for additional local resources," the company said in its blogpost.

The company also said that it has been working with the health ministry's Rapid Risk Response team and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to track misinformation pertaining to vaccination drive using social media tools and combat it with science-based messaging on vaccines and pandemic.

Additionally, the company highlighted the launch of information panels that show up while searching for Covid-19 related queries and banners on the YouTube homepage, both of which redirect the resources on the website of the health ministry.

Teams have also helped in optimising the website of the ministry for mobile viewers including localisation of several vaccination resources pages into the eight Indian languages, the company claimed.

India, as of Friday morning, has administered more than 2.61 crore Covid-19 vaccines doses through 487,919 sessions. This includes over one million vulnerable people aged between 45-59 years who have received the first dose of the vaccine and six million people above age 60 who have received the first dose, as per the health ministry data.