Chaotic scenes outside most Covid vaccination centres run by the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) have become a daily affair.
People join the queue while it’s still dark and wait for hours only to be told they cannot be vaccinated that day because of shortage of doses.
The lucky ones who do get the jab return home after standing in the queue for as long as seven to eight hours.
On Tuesday, people started queuing up outside some of the Covid vaccination centres at 2am or 3am. Some of them who arrived a “bit late” — around 5am — learnt around 10.30am that the centre would run out of doses before their turn came.
Dipankar Bhowmick, a resident of Kasba, arrived outside a vaccination centre in Kasba’s Jadavgarh at 5.30am on Tuesday. There were already around 1,000 people in the queue.
“I waited in the queue for five hours. Around 10.30am, employees of the CMC came and said they had received only 200 doses of Covaxin. They distributed coupons for Covishield first and then for Covaxin. The 200 Covaxin coupons were exhausted before my turn came,” Bhowmick recounted.
He said he would join the queue on Wednesday at 2am.
Bhowmick said four members of his family were waiting for their second dose of Covaxin. He visited two private hospitals but was deterred from taking the jabs there because of the cost. The hospitals are charging Rs 1,400 for one dose of Covaxin.
Another Calcuttan said he had joined the queue at a CMC clinic at 1am last Saturday to get a coupon which would ensure a jab.
“Officials announced around 8am that coupons would not be distributed because of shortage of doses. They could have made the announcement or displayed a notice earlier. That could have saved us from harassment,” the man said.
For people like Bhowmick there is no option but to wait under the sun and in rain to get vaccinated.
Long queues, often stretching 100 metres or so, are seen outside most CMC vaccination centres daily. The physical distancing norm, a must to prevent infection, is hardly followed in the queues.
Frequent altercations break out if anyone suspects a person is jumping the queue, as most people remain agitated waiting for so long. The areas outside the gates of the vaccination centres and primary health centres, as well as the space inside, remain crowded with people waiting to get vaccinated.
The chaos has only been aggravated by the scarcity of vaccine doses, especially Covaxin.
The CMC has decided to administer only the second dose of Covaxin for now to ensure that no one misses out on the second jab, said Atin Ghosh, a member of the CMC’s board of administrators who is in charge of the civic body’s health department.
“We will administer only the second dose of Covaxin. No second dose recipient will be turned away,” he said.
CMC doctors, however, said they had no option but to turn away prospective recipients if doses got exhausted for the day.
“It often happens that there are more people in the queue than the number of doses we have received. Our hands are tied. We always advise people who are being turned away to come back the next day,” said a senior CMC doctor who is managing vaccination in a part of Calcutta.
In Bidhannagar, identical scenes are witnessed outside vaccination centres. At least 10 centres run by the Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation have been shut down because of shortage of doses, an official of the civic body.
“Only Matri Sadan Hospital in Salt Lake’s EE Block and Narayanpur Matri Sadan Hospital in Rajarhat are administering shots,” an official said. “But these two centres are struggling because a large number of people are queuing up.”
