Amid reports of the Covid-19 vaccine’s rollout in the country soon, Bengal’s first dry run of the vaccination process was held at three places in North 24-Parganas on Saturday.

At each of the three places, huge crowds had gathered, mistaking the dry run for actual immunisation.

The state health department held the dry run or mock vaccination drill to examine infrastructure readiness that includes logistic support, uploading dummy beneficiary data, adherence to actual implementation protocol, side effects care and finding gaps, if any.

The dry run was conducted at the Amdanga rural hospital, the urban primary health centre of Madhyamgram Municipality and the Duttabad primary health centre under Bidhannagar Municipal Corporation).

At each of the three camps, 25 health workers earlier registered as “beneficiaries” through specific applications had to undergo mock vaccination in the presence of representatives of World Health Organisation, Unicef, and health officials of central and state governments.

However, news of the dry run created confusion among a large number of people who turned up at the health care facilities “to get vaccinated”.

It took health department officials time to clear the misconception and clear the centres of the massive crowds to carry out the mock drill.

The eagerness among people to get vaccinated comes in the backdrop of the news that India’s drug regulatory expert panel on Friday recommended the emergency use of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine against Covid-19.

A district health official, who was involved in the dry run in Amdanga, said: “News spread among residents that the Covid vaccination had begun and they started to gather in large numbers.

nly after we explained to them that it was a mock drill before the actual rollout did they go.”

Amdanga villager Asadul Biswas said it wasn’t their fault. “People have been eagerly waiting for the Covid-19 vaccine. When we saw the camp at Amdanga hospital, we rushed there but was told that it was only a mock drill,” he said.

Saturday’s dry run in Bengal was the second such exercise in the country under the guidance of the Union ministry of health.

The first lot of mock drills was held on December 28-29 in Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab and Gujarat.

Chief medical officer of health of Barasat Tapas Kumar Roy said: “The trial run was held to examine the operational feasibility of vaccination as well as its planning and implementation of the Covid Vaccine Intelligence Network application in real environment. The entire process was smooth.”

At each healthcare facility, health workers in queues maintained social distance. On entering the facility, their registered identity number was verified through the dedicated app. They were taken to a room where mock vaccination was done. Then, a text message was sent informing the person about the next date of vaccination. The beneficiary was taken to the third room, the observation centre, where a vaccination officer monitored the person for 30 minutes for “side effects”. In case of any side effect, a rapid response team will provide medical support, a health official said.

Ananya Dutta, public health manager of Madhyamgram Municipality said: “We followed all the protocol, physically implementing it in the application on a real time basis. We are happy that no drawback in the mechanism was detected.”

Swapna Ghosh, a health worker who took part in the dry run, said: “The experience was quite exciting and I am waiting for the jab that would help ward off Covid-19.”