India may be that country to vaccinate one million people at a faster pace than UK or US, the country would take a time period of atleast 3 years to complete the priority target of 300 million population, if the vaccination drive proceeds at the current rate, reveal experts.
Presently, the daily capacity of vaccination is around 300,000 people. Considering the first week’s count, the present rate if vaccination is about 58 % of the capacity, which is subjected to improve in the coming weeks.
However, as per virologist Shahid Jameel, director of the Trivedi School of Biosciences, Ashoka University if the vaccination rate has an improvement to an average of 200,000 on a daily basis, with 67 per cent or 2/3rd capacity in the next two months, the vaccination of 30 million healthcare and frontline workers would take 5 months or till mid-June.
The inoculation of the 270 million higher age group will be initiated while the second phase of the 20 million frontline workers is still being vaccinated which is scheduled likely for late April or early May. With respect to the current capacity of 300,000 per day, the expected time would still be 27 months. And, as per following the norms, every beneficiary is supposed to receive two doses at the interval of 4 weeks, the anticipated time would be 36 months.
Jameel said, “The bottleneck is not vaccine availability, but our ability to get it into people. We will require much more capacity to get this done faster.”
The health experts give their opinion that India needs to aggravate the vaccination exercise to vaccinate 3-4 million people daily if it has to vaccinate 300 million by August, which is an ardent task as per the current rates.
