Several private hospitals that started giving Covid-19 vaccine jabs to senior citizens and people above 45 with comorbidities on Wednesday got the recipients registered with the Co-Win2 portal at their help desks, instead of having them self-register, to avoid delays and long waits.
However, many private hospitals could not start vaccinating the two categories because of glitches in the registration portal.
To get vaccinated, prospective recipients need to register with a particular hospital for a date through the Co-Win2 portal. However, since Monday, the first day of vaccination of the elderly and people above 45 with comorbidities, the portal has been developing glitches frequently.
So on Tuesday, many of the hospitals helped prospective recipients register themselves through the portal on their premises.
At Peerless Hospital, 63 elderly persons were vaccinated on Wednesday and all got themselves registered at the hospital. Hospital officials said that since Tuesday night, they had been calling up senior citizens who are registered patients of Peerless to visit the hospital and get vaccinated against Covid on Wednesday.
“We have set up help-desks and our employees helped the recipients get registered with the portal. Shots were given after that. This way, there was no confusion about timing. Nor were there long queues,” said Sudipta Mitra, the chief executive of Peerless Hospital.
He said no one who had pre-registered for vaccination turned up.
At the RN Tagore International Institute of Cardiac Sciences, 55 elderly people were vaccinated and all the registrations were done at the spot, said officials.
“We had initially planned to do manual recording of the details of elderly people because there were problems with the functioning of the portal on the first two days (Monday and Tuesday). This way the recipients would have been spared long waits. But this morning we saw the portal was functioning and so decided to first get the recipients registered and then give the doses,” said R. Venkatesh, regional director, east, Narayana Health, of which the Mukundapur hospital is a flagship unit.
Spot registration, he said, was taking 15 minutes to half an hour because the portal was slow. “We will be continuing with the spot registration on Thursday, too,” said Venkatesh.
Metro reported on Tuesday and Wednesday how the malfunctioning of the Co-Win2 portal was leading to long waits for elderly people at hospitals and also created confusion. Many people had to go back without taking a jab, while others waited for hours to get one.
The situation was better on Wednesday.
“Despite some initial glitches with the Co-Win platform, the situation improved by noon and we could vaccinate a sizeable number of people,” said Rupak Barua, Group CEO, AMRI Hospitals. However, the vaccination could not start at the hospital’s Salt Lake unit because of glitches, said an official of AMRI.
At Charnock Hospital, vaccination could not start on Wednesday because of the same reason.
“We could not get access to the portal. Also, payments to buy the vials needed to be done through the portal, which could not be done,” said Ipsita Kundu, the CEO of the hospital.
She said the hospital received hundreds of calls from elderly people who wanted to know whether the vaccination had started.
An official of the state health department said the functioning of the Co-Win2 portal improved on Wednesday and expressed the hope that all hospitals would be able to administer the doses on Thursday. The hospitals, he said, will be allowed spot-registration.
