BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) is now planning to develop a mobile application to fasten and smoothen the process of distributing the COVID-19 vaccine. This application will be made on similar lines as the CoWin-20 application of the central government. Civic officials said the decision of developing the application was taken in a meeting held by the task force members on Friday. The government aims to make it the digital arm of its COVID-19 vaccination programme.
A senior health official, who is the member of state COVID-19 task force, said the government had come out with the Aarogya Setu app to keep a track of the cases and concentration. Similarly, they are now planning to develop an application to smoothen the process of the COVID-19 vaccine. “The main aim of the CoWin-20 application is to help agencies to keep a track of the COVID-19 vaccination programme and allow Indian citizens to apply for a vaccine shot,” he said.
He further said that this application will contain the data of all those who will be given the vaccine dose first and other basic details about the COVID-19 vaccine. “The person related to this application will also have to link their Aadhaar card and mobile number. Alert messages will also be sent to him regarding the next vaccine,” official added.
Suresh Kakani, additional municipal commissioner, BMC, and also heading the city’s vaccine task force, said they have taken various decisions regarding the smooth processing and distribution of the vaccine in the first meeting of the vaccine task force held on Friday. Developing a mobile application for the vaccine on similar lines as that of CoWin-20 of the central government was one of the agenda of the meeting. “Soon we will be developing an application in which all the details about the vaccine will be available to the citizens. We will get details about cases and recovered patients numbers on the Arogya Setu app,” he said.
Meanwhile, Maharashtra has informed the Centre that it can store 3 crore vaccine doses in cold storage. Till Friday, the state had uploaded data of nearly 1.91 lakh healthcare workers on the government application, CoWin, for priority vaccination.
For the COVID-19 vaccination drive in Mumbai, a total of 1,365 vaccinators have been identified from the civic Public Health Department. Of the identified 1.25 lakh health workers in line to be the first recipients, the details of 10,000 have been uploaded on CoWin, which is being used to track the vaccine movement nationally.
“We want to finish vaccinating the healthcare workers in 15 days. One centre will vaccinate 1,200 beneficiaries per day,” Kakani added.
