87% turnout in West Bengal on Day 6, highest since vaccine rollout

KOLKATA: On a day when Bengal planned to double the Covid vaccine recipients, it clocked an attendance of 87%. On Friday, 30,517 people were vaccinated from across 351 centres in the state. Eleven cases of AEFI (adverse event following immunisation) were reported and only one was admitted to hospital for observation.
“Our target on Friday was 35,100 from across 351 vaccination centres.The turnout was 87%. A total of 84,505 persons have been vaccinated in these six days. The target was 1,18,372 and the overall turnout of 71% is reasonably good,” said Ajay Chakraborty, director of health services (DHS)
Friday’s is the highest turnout rate the state has achieved in six days — January 16, 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22. On Thursday, 81% of target recipients had taken the jab. Even as the Co-WIN portal had teething issues on and off, officials said it did not cause any major problem on Friday.
“Most of the 11 AEFI cases reported on Friday were minor,” said the DHS.
Health department had asked medical colleges and some hospitals to have two session sites on Friday. While majority of them had two session sites, IPGMER that has about 9,000 healthworkers to be vaccinated, operated three sites.
“Though our target was 200, we decided to have three sites in our hospital and ended up vaccinating 275. We will be increasing the number of sites from coming week,” said IPGMER’s MSVP Raghuanth Misra.
Glitches in Co-WIN app slowed down the process initially in most centres. “There was a trouble in the app. Even though it didn’t hamper the process, it caused hassles in uploading data. We had to maintain it manually till the disruption was over,” said Chittaranjan Seva Sadan (CSS) principal Ashish Mukhopadhyay.
“Even as we had 123 recipients on Thursday, the number dipped to 86 on Friday. But since the number of HCWs is lower compared to medical colleges we could vaccinate around 50% of our recipients so far,” said community medicine specialist Sanjib Bandyopadhyay, supervisor at vaccination centre of ID&BG Hospital.
“We had two session sites on Friday. Despite trouble in Co-WIN app on and off we had a better turnout,” said NRS Medical College principal Saibal Mukherjee.