In a significant development towards rolling out a successful vaccination drive to curb the spread of the COVID-19 viral infection, Tamil Nadu and several parts of the nation have been conducting a dry run for the first stage of the vaccination on Saturday. The Tamil Nadu government has set up the dry vaccine trial in five districts with the aim of vaccinating healthcare and frontline workers.

According to reports, the dry vaccine trial in Tamil Nadu would be replicating every step of the real vaccination drive to check preparedness of vaccinating hundreds of thousands of people across the state. The dry run of the vaccine would be conducted at 17 locations of five districts in Tamil Nadu - Chennai, Tirunelveli, Coimbatore, the Nilgiris, and Thiruvallur. Some of the locations include Rajiv Gandhi Government General Hospital in Chennai, ESI Hospital in Coimbatore, and Ooty Medical College Hospital. 

Apart from these locations, the dry vaccine trials will also take place at the selected primary health centers in the corporation and rural areas in these five districts during which the state health department would conduct the dry vaccine trial among the healthcare workers and the health department has determined to vaccinate more than five lakh health workers at the first phase of the real vaccination drive. 

The reports say that the aim of the dry run is to check and ensure that the real vaccination drive goes well to mark the significant development in fighting the pandemic. The dry vaccine trial will check the multiple steps of the vaccination like assembling beneficiaries, checking identity, administering vaccine shots, recording data, and observing them for 30 minutes. The dry run would also check the time taken to vaccinate a person as well as the mechanisms of using the CoWIN application, which would be issuing the certificate to the person after getting vaccinated. 

Tamil Nadu Health Secretary Dr. J Radhakrishnan said that each of these 17 centers will be equipped with a vaccination team consisting of five people - a doctor, a staff nurse, a village health or urban health nurse, a compute operator to handle the CoWIN app and one more member. The health officials will be checking the centers that they have proper entry and exit, waiting area, cold storage facilities,  and a separate enclosure for people to wait after vaccination for observation. 

As the health department aims to vaccinate five lakh healthcare workers in the first phase of the vaccination drive, the directorate of public health plans to send messages to the health workers' phone about the time they should be present at the vaccination site and the follow-up date and time for the booster dose. According to reports, the directorate has a list of 3.5 lakh healthcare workers until now including doctors, nurses, and paramedical staff from the government and private hospitals across the state. 

As the directorate is yet to get the list of additional 1.5 lakh workers to reach the target of 5 lakh healthcare workers, the directorate has been calling the staff of the government and private hospitals to register themselves for the first phase of the COVID-19 vaccination.  Following healthcare workers, as the next step of vaccination, the state will vaccinate other frontline workers such as police, armed forces, disaster management staff, and home guard. In the second phase of the vaccination, the state aims to vaccinate the people above 50 years and people with comorbidities along with the second batch of the frontline workers. 

Speaking to a news agency, Radhakrishnan said that 25 healthcare workers from each of these five districts -Chennai, Tirunelveli, Coimbatore, the Nilgiris, and Thiruvallur will be selected for the dry run vaccine trial and the trial would be directly monitored by the director of the public health. In Saturday's dry run, these workers won't be vaccinated, instead, the trail would be the prefix of how to carry out the real vaccination drive after the vaccine arrives. Radhakrishnan said that during the dry run, it would be monitored whether 25 workers can be vaccinated in two hours and the trial will also be testing how to streamline the process of the vaccination.