BHOPAL: Residents of the 45+ age group in the city have faced difficulties in getting the second dose of the Covid-19 vaccine. Private hospitals have stopped vaccinations as they have not received supplies of vaccines and even the government hospitals are short of jabs.
Vaccination for citizens of the 18-44 years age group was supposed to begin on May 1. However, it is yet to pick up pace and, by the governmentís own admission, just a couple of hundred persons have been inoculated till date. The government had assured residents that vaccination for the 45+ age group would continue uninterrupted. But even that is not happening.
Vax centre turned into testing facility
Theatre artiste Bishna Chouhan, 46, has been trying to get the second shot for the past one week, but to no avail. She is being shunted from one centre to another. As hundreds of others in her area, Bishna got her first Covishield shot at a vaccination centre in Naya Basera, Kotra Sultanabad. However, when she went there to get the second shot, she found the centre converted into a testing facility. She was told that she should go to JP Hospital. "I didn"t go there as I feared it would be too crowded," Bishna, who had contracted Covid-19 last year, told Free Press.
The next day, a former corporator of the area circulated information about another centre where people could go. "I went there, but was told that only 100 people were being vaccinated every day and that I should come early in the morning if I wanted to get the shot," Bishna said. The next day, she reached the centre at 10.15 am, but found that vaccinations had been stopped there. She was then asked to go to Sanjeevni in Ban Ganga.
There, she was told that only Covaxin was being administered at the centre and Bishna was redirected to JP Hospital once more. "I went to a tent erected on the hospital premises and asked about vaccination. I was told to go upstairs, but the nurses sitting there werenít sure whether vaccination was being done or not," she said.
On Tuesday, she visited five centres. "At some, I was told that vaccination wasn't done there on Tuesdays and Fridays. At others, the vaccine was unavailable," she added, saying she really felt sorry for those elderly people who were going through the same ordeal.
Vax exhausted more than once
Dates changed for second shot
Vaccine centre keeps shifting
Problems galore
? Private hospitals have stopped vaccinations
? Many government vaccination centres have been closed or shifted
? There is a shortage of vaccines in government centres
? Some centres are insisting on booking appointments through the CoWin app
? Many roads in the city have been barricaded, forcing people to take long routes to reach the vaccination centres
? There is no clarity when vaccines will be delivered to a particular centre, forcing people to make many rounds of the same place
? People, including senior citizens, have to wait for their turn standing in the hot sun
