Sikkim government has urged the Centre to provide smaller refrigerated vehicles to transport Covid-19 vaccines — as and when they are made available — since bigger vehicles cannot reach every nook and cranny of the Himalayan state.
Pempa T Bhutia, the director general-cum-secretary of the Sikkim health department, said, in the past, the Centre had provided huge vaccine-carrier vans that were not able to negotiate the twists and turns of the roads in Sikkim.
“This time, we have urged the government of India to give us five Boleros to carry the vaccines since smaller vehicles can reach anywhere. If the Centre expresses its inability to provide smaller vehicles, the government of Sikkim has already committed to providing them,” he said.
Bhutia, who has been helming Sikkim’s fight against Covid-19, has said the state is adequately equipped to store and administer Covid vaccines, once available.
“We had established storage facilities like ice-lined refrigerators during the HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccination drive that we can make use for Covid vaccination,” he said.
The health secretary said unlike the pulse polio drive where health workers used to administer drops at the homes of the recipients, the Covid vaccination drive would require setting up of booths at different places to administer the jabs. “Such booths are already in place and we are confident of starting the vaccination drive from very day the vaccines are made available to us,” he said.
According to the directive of the Centre, the inoculation drive would be carried out in a phase-wise manner. “The first to be covered will be the health workers, who number about 9,000 in our state, followed by between 14,000 and 15,000 frontline workers. Thereafter, those above 50 years of age and persons with comorbidities will be covered,” he added.
Till Monday, the state had recorded 5,221 cases of coronavirus with 129 deaths.
Sikkim was the last state in the country to be afflicted by Covid.
It was almost four months after the first case was reported in Kerala in late January, 2020.
