TLI Staff
New Delhi: Government is in talks with private hospitals, vaccine manufacturers regarding the pricing of Covid-19 vaccinations in private hospitals and may announce it in the coming 3-4 days, as per news reports. A set of reports says that private hospitals have given an estimate of Rs 400 per dose including Rs 300 for vaccine and Rs 100 for administration charges.
However, as per the latest news reports, Rs 300 is likely to be the cost of vaccination to be given in private hospitals and govt is planning to cap it. In government hospitals, the vaccines will be provided free of cost.
The next phase of vaccination begins from March 1 and will cover people above the age of 60 and above 45 with co-morbidities. For faciliation of the vaccination process, the central government has introduced a mobile app called CoWIN which will give three options for registration that includes self-registration, individual registration and bulk upload. The app is not live yet even though it’s available for download in Google Playstore.
According to reports, only a limited number of doses will be provided to private hospitals so there is no scope of black marketing and the vaccination process could be carried out step-by-step in a phased manner. Currently the vaccine is being manufactured by two companies in India –Pune-based Serum Institute of India (SII) and Hyderabad-based Bharat Biotech.
Talking about the preparedness to give Covid vaccines, AIIMS Director Dr. Randeep Guleria had earlier talked about the opening of more vaccination centres so that more people could be vaccinated. “As far as co-morbidities are concerned if we take people over the age of 50 and just having this age cut-off, many people with co-morbidities almost 70-75% will be covered in this bracket as most co-morbidities also happen after this age,” he said in a media interview.
“Also criteria have been created for vaccination of those less than 50 age group that have co-morbidities. There are patients having chronic kidney diseases, cardiac problem, disabilities, respiratory failure. They will also be on the list to be vaccinated,” he added.
About new strains of the virus and how to deal with them
“The role of vaccination and Covid appropriate behaviour become very important because of the mutations that are happening or the variants. We must understand that coronavirus is like any other RNA viruses that will mutate. There will be more mutations because of the vaccinations because there will be vaccination pressure on
viruses to mutate also. We must have aggressive strategies in place. We have a very aggressive surveillance mechanism in the country which are taking samples to see for any mutation that is happening in India in the variants that are coming and strategies are being developed regarding isolating people so they don’t spread it to others and at the same time rolling of vaccination so that more and more people have immunity and are protected against coronavirus infection be it old or new strain. At the same time there has to be aggressive research so that we are able to match the changes which happen with changes in vaccination. So that when next generation vaccination comes we should be able to cover emerging mutants also,” said Dr. Guleria.
Surge in cases in Kerala and Mahrashtra
“There is a lot of data that we need to collect on why it’s happening. It’s possible that in some states, in Kerala for example, they did very well in the beginning. So they may have population that is susceptible because they were able to contain it very well in the early parts. And with a lot of opening up and decrease in Covid appropriate behaviour there has been a surge in this susceptible population that has not been exposed to early part of the pandemic because cases there were less. Because of travel, number of factors, we have lowered our guard in terms of covid appropriate behaviour. This is giving virus an opportunity to spread in certain areas and when one event becomes a super-spreading event then in that area suddenly there will be increase in number of cases. It is important to understand covid appropriate behaviour–wearing a mask, maintain physical distance, washing your hands. All this will break the chain of transmission and even if we have variants they will not be able to spread in the country,” he said.