The Calcutta Municipal Corporation’s Covid vaccination centres will follow a new vaccination schedule from Monday after having experimented with two other schedules over the past week.
In the new schedule, all CMC centres will administer first and second doses Monday through Saturday but in separate time slots. The centres remain closed on Sundays.
Details of the new schedule:
Time slots
The first dose of Covid vaccines will be administered between 10am and 3pm on all six days. The second dose will be administered from 3pm to 4pm.
Last week’s schedule
The civic body had first reserved three days in a week for the first dose and another three days for the second. This schedule was changed after CMC officials realised that the takers for second doses were far fewer than the number of shots available.
This was surprising because the centres used to have long queues and almost half the people would have to return without getting the jab.
Towards the middle of last week, the CMC centres decided to administer the second dose on two days a week and the first dose on four days. But the number of second dose recipients still remained low.
Eventually, the CMC decided to administer the first and second shots every day but in separate time slots. The latest schedule will come into effect on Monday.
Preparations
Doctors managing the Covid vaccination centres said posters had been put up outside many vaccination centres informing people about the new schedule. “If needed, people with loud hailers will be deployed outside the centres,” said an official.
Allocation
Each centre has been allotted 150 doses of Covishield and 200 doses of Covaxin for Monday, said a CMC official. A clinic in Chetla, which has administered the maximum number of shots among all civic clinics, has been allotted 500 doses for Monday, said officials.
“We will try to follow an 80-20 division. Eighty per cent of the shots will be administered to first dose recipients and the rest to the second dose recipients,” said an official of the CMC.
Civic doctors hope the quota for the first dose recipients will be used up in the five hours reserved for them.
“Over the past few weeks, we noticed that 80 per cent of those getting vaccinated at our clinics were first dose recipients. Many of them were from neighbouring districts. We will not turn them away since everyone has the right to get vaccinated,” said the official.
The CMC is running a Covid vaccination drive from its primary health centres and a number of community halls and auditoriums that have been tagged as megacentres. The civic body now runs 173 Covid vaccination centres.
Concerns
A senior doctor at the CMC said they were concerned over the routine immunisation of children at its centres on Wednesdays.
“Earlier, the first two or three hours on Wednesdays were kept reserved for routine immunisation of children as part of the universal immunisation programme. But in the new schedule, Covid vaccination will be held from 10am to 4pm, like on other days. How will we vaccinate children under the universal immunisation programme?” asked one CMC doctor.
Some of the primary health centres administer vaccines to as many as 50 children every Wednesday. Doctors fear routine immunisation will suffer if a few hours on Wednesday are not reserved for it.
