Union Ministry of Health & Family Welfare conducted a two-day dry run for activities entailed in COVID-19 vaccination in four states Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Punjab and Gujarat on December 28-29 2020.

Backed with the experience of rolling out Universal Immunisation Programme (UIP) and conducting nationwide multiple wide-range injectable vaccination campaigns such as measles-rubella (MR) and adult Japanese Encephalitis (JE) campaign, required steps are being undertaken to vaccinate priority population groups such as healthcare workers, frontline workers and people above 50 years for COVID-19. 

The dry run exercise is aimed at end-to-end testing of COVID-19 vaccination process and will include planning & preparations as per the Operational Guidelines; creation of facilities & users on Co-WIN application, session site creation & mapping of sites, Health Care Workers (HCW) data upload, receipt of vaccines and vaccine allocation by the district, session planning, deployment of vaccination team, logistics mobilisation at session site, mock drill of conducting vaccination and reporting and review meetings at block, districts and state level. The objective of dry the run is also to undertake and confirm field implementation of IT platform Co-WIN and guide way forward prior to actual implementation.

The two-day end-to-end dry run was undertaken in Krishna district in Andhra Pradesh, Rajkot and Gandhinagar in Gujarat, Ludhiana and Shaheed Bhagat Singh Nagar (Nawanshahr) in Punjab and Sonitpur and Nalbari districts in Assam. Specific teams were formed for various tasks by the district administration and activities like uploading of dummy beneficiary’s data, session site creation, vaccine allocation, communication vaccination details to vaccinators& beneficiaries, beneficiary mobilisation were carried out. Detailed insights and feedback so obtained will help enrich the operational guidelines and IT platform and will strengthen the COVID-19 vaccination roll out plan.