Nearly 70 per cent of the Covid vaccine doses administered at Kolkata Municipal Corporation clinics over the past week were second jabs, civic officials said on Sunday.
The trend is a reversal of the situation in late-August when the number of second dose recipients was far fewer compared with the number of doses allotted for them.
An official of the KMC’s health department said the civic body’s vaccination centres were administering between 35,000 and 40,000 doses every day over the past week.
“Of these, between 28,000 and 30,000 were second doses,” said the official.
The sharp rise in the demand for the second jab has led the civic body to reserve the first half every day for administering only second doses.
The second dose is administered between 9am and 2pm and the first between 2pm and 4pm.
In late-August, the KMC had reserved separate days for administering the first and the second dose. The system was scrapped as the vaccination centres witnessed a low turnout for the second dose.
A KMC official said doctors in charge of Covid vaccination centres of the civic body had been told to give priority to second dose recipients.
“Suppose a centre receives 250 doses on a given day and there are 200 people in the queue for the second dose. The centres will vaccinate all second dose recipients in the queue first,” said one KMC official.
Once all second dose recipients are vaccinated, the remaining doses will be administered to people turning up for the first.
Private hospitals, too, are witnessing an uptick in the number of second dose recipients.
Metro reported on Saturday that private hospitals again started organising a good number of outreach vaccination camps following a surge in demand after a brief lull.
Among the factors driving the demand for such camps is the large number of second doses that have become due.
“We are administering about 500 jabs at our hospital every day, of which 70 per cent are second doses. Around 90 per cent of the 300 jabs being administered in outreach camps every day are second doses,” said an official at the RN Tagore International Institute of Cardiac Sciences.
According to the CoWIN portal, of the 56,437 jabs administered in the city on Saturday, 41,105 were second doses. Friday’s corresponding figures were 30,411 and 20,486 doses.