The much-awaited COVISHIELD vaccine from the Pune-based Serum Institute of India (SII) arrived in Mumbai on Wednesday morning. The BMC has decided to inoculate 12,000 healthcare workers per day in the next 10 days starting from Saturday (January 16). They have received the first batch of 1,39,500 COVISHIELD vaccines. Each bottle is 5ml. Civic officials said that from tomorrow they will distribute vaccines to the centres and it will be stored at a temperature of 2 to 8 degrees Celsius Moreover they will be giving one dose of 0.5ml to each beneficiary.
There are nine vaccination centres in Mumbai which includes four major civic-run hospitals namely The King Edward Memorial (KEM), BYL Nair, RN Cooper and Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General (Sion) Hospital; four peripheral hospitals namely Bhabha Hospital in Bandra, VN Desai Hospital in Santacruz, Rajawadi Hospital in Ghatkopar and Bharat Ratna Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Hospital in Kandivali; and the Covid-19 facility at Bandra-Kurla Complex.
The centres have a total of 72 booths for vaccination, and each booth will be handled by a team of five vaccinators. Only 50 booths will be activated on the day of vaccination drive. So far more than two lakhs beneficiaries have registered themselves at the CoWin application, of which 1.25 lakhs HCWs will be inoculated in the first phase.
“The nine vaccination centres with a total of 50 booths have a capacity to vaccinate 12,000 to 14,000 people a day. Once the drive is launched on January 16, it will continue every day for the next 10 days until the beneficiaries shortlisted for the first phase are vaccinated. However, we are planning to complete it in a week. We have not received information on when the second phase will start. We are also yet to receive information on how many doses we will get in the first lot on Wednesday,” said Suresh Kakani, Additional Municipal Commissioner.
Swapnaja Kshirsagar, assistant commissioner, F-South ward, said the doses will be stored temporarily for which they had vacated a room on the ground floor of the ward office building and handed it over to the civic health department for storing vaccine doses. All logistics thereafter are being handled by the health department.
“The storage facility at F-South ward has a total of 10 ice-lined refrigerators with a capacity to store up to 600,000 vaccine doses at a time. The distribution mechanism already existing under the routine immunisation programme shall be implemented for Covid-19 vaccine. Additional vehicles will be deployed for transporting the vaccine from the Kanjurmarg facility to the vaccine centres with the help of police,” she said.
