BBMP has 'bruhat' plan to vaccinate 60k sr citizens a day

Bengaluru: With the cooperation of the private hospitals, Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) aims at inoculating around 60,000 senior citizens in a day. Efforts have been made to reduce the waiting period for receiving the vaccination at hospitals.

Speaking at Manipal Hospitals, N. Manjunatha Prasad, Commissioner, BBMP, said, "The second phase of vaccination started in Bangalore on Monday and, on the first day, as on a trial basis, we roped in 24 hospitals for vaccination and close to 1060 people got vaccinated on the first day. On the second day, we faced a few glitches in the Cowin software, and we immediately rectified the issue by updating Cowin 1.0 to Cowin 2.0 for over 3168 people. Today, we have a target of 4,600 people, and by the beginning of next week, we are planning to scale up to 300 hospitals, inclusive of government and private institutions, to make the vaccine easily accessible. All the 141 healthcare centres under BBMP will be able to provide vaccination from Monday. All the 107 private hospitals with more than 100 bed capacity will also be involved in the process starting from next week. I am happy to see that, many hospitals who have less than 100 bed capacity are proactively showing interest in becoming a vaccination hub. Once all the 300 hospitals start providing vaccination, we will be able to provide vaccination to close to 60,000 people per day. Along with online registration on the portal, people can also avail on-spot registrations by directly walking into the nearest vaccination hub. For those who can't access the online registrations in rural areas, our Asha workers and Anganwadi Workers (ANM) will mobilise and bring them to the primary healthcare centres. The city of Bangalore has welcomed the vaccination drive with a lot of enthusiasm and this motivates us to scale our vaccination hubs to make is accessible to each and every citizen."

Dr H. Sudarshan Ballal, Chairman of Manipal Hospitals said, "The vaccination drive for senior citizens and people with comorbidities of age 45 and above started on Monday. I sincerely thank our BBMP Commissioner and BBMP Special Commissioner for personally supervising this and providing encouragement to successfully conduct the vaccination drive. We have seen a lot of people coming forward to take the vaccination. We have ironed out all the issues we faced in the first two days, and are hopeful of having a smooth vaccination process. This is our major weapon in fighting the menace of COVID-19, and we are really looking forward to welcoming more people to come forward and take the vaccination. More importantly, I would also urge the citizens to not let their guard down and continue the usage of mask, maintain social distance, and follow all the sanitization protocols."