Jalandhar District meets biggest one-day target as 458 vaccinated

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, January 21

The Health Department’s drive to involve private hospitals in the Covid-19 vaccination drive seems to be paying off rich dividends. On the fifth day of the drive in the district, 458 beneficiaries received the dose. This was the largest single day number of people vaccinated in the district so far. As many as 200 health workers got vaccinated at Tagore Hospital, 106 at PIMS, 64 each at SGL Charitable and Shriman Hospitals and 24 persons at the Civil Hospital.

While the session sites at the Basti Gujan and Nakodar hospitals have already been closed, the Health Department now mulls closing the session site at the Civil Hospital too due to low turnout of volunteers. District Immunisation Officer Dr Rakesh Chopra said, “Since Tagore Hospital has more than 600 staff members and PIMS has over 900 staff, the session sites at these facilities will continue for the next few days. We are also visiting more private hospitals and have planned to start at least six to seven more session sites at private hospitals in the coming days. Meanwhile, with the number of volunteers visiting the Civil Hospital is decreasing by the day, we also plan to close the Civil Hospital session site soon.”

While the district had ordered 16,490 doses of the Covid vaccination, even 1,000 of these have not been used so far in the first five days of the drive. Responding to apprehensions of the damage to vaccine (vials) if the stored doses remained unused for long, Dr Rakesh Chopra said, “The expiry of the vaccination is six months. We expect to cover all 11,800 health workers till then. While one vial of the vaccine (which has 10 doses) has to be used within six hours of opening it, we do not open the vial until we have at least six to seven patients lined up. We already have a 10 per cent margin of wastage. So, at present there are no concerns of vaccines going bad.”

378 get Covid shots on fourth day in Hoshiarpur

On the fourth day of the vaccination drive, 378 beneficiaries, including the in-charge of Civil Hospital, Hoshiarpur, Dr Jaswinder Singh, were vaccinated on Thursday.

The doctors, para-medical and sanitation staff of the Civil Hospital also got themselves vaccinated. District Immunisation Officer Dr Seema Garg said as per the instructions of the Health Department, Covid-19 immunisation was being done at health institutions and vaccination was being done by matching the mobile number and identity card of the already registered health workers. After getting the jab, Senior Medical Officer Dr Jaswinder Singh said the vaccine was safe and health workers should get vaccinated without any fear. He said the vaccination centre has been set up in the hospital as per the instructions of the Government of India and the beneficiaries were kept under the care of medical team for 30 minutes after vaccination.

Kulwant Kaur, Anita Luthra, Mandeep Saini Manju and Amarjit Singh served as vaccinators and Jai Kumar was the data operator. — OC

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