The Centre has planned a dry run of COVID-19 vaccination process in Sonitpur and Nalbari districts of Assam, along with six other districts of the country on December 28 and 29.

The other districts where the dry run of COVID-19 vaccination would be conducted are two districts each in Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Punjab.

Sonitpur and Nalbari districts were selected for the dry run of COVID-19 vaccination drive because of their infrastructure and manpower readily available to cover different settings including medical college, district hospital, private health institution, urban and rural outreach.

Five sites have been selected in Sonitpur which include Tezpur Medical College and Hospital, Dekiajuli CHC, Tezpur Urban Health Centre, Times Hospital (private health institution) and No.2 Rongaghora HWC under Dekiajuli BPHC.

The five sites in Nalbari are Nalbari District Civil Hospital, Ghograpar Block PHC, Sarathi Hospital (private health institution), Nalbari Urban Health Centre and Balitara Mini PHC.

"The dry run is meant to strengthen the capacity of our human resource for introduction and roll-out, detailed training modules have been developed for different categories of vaccine handlers and administrators including medical officers, vaccinators, alternate vaccinators, cold chain handlers, supervisors, data managers, ASHA coordinators and all others involved in the implementation process at different levels,” a union health ministry statement said.

"The exercise will provide hands-on experience to programme managers at various levels," the statement added.

It further said that the drive will include activities from the necessary data entries in Co-WIN to vaccine receipt and allocation to the deployment of team members, mock drill of session sites with test beneficiaries to reporting and evening meetings.

“This will also include testing for cold storage and transportation arrangements for COVID-19 vaccine, management of crowds at the session sites with proper physical distancing,” it further added.

It may be mentioned here that a total of 2,360 participants were trained and this included state immunisation officers, cold chain officers, IEC officials and development partners among others.

The state-level training had been completed in all the states with the participation of over 7000 district level trainees.

However, in Lakshadweep, the training would be conducted next week.

It's worth mentioning here that around 60 lakh people will be administered the COVID-19 vaccine in the first phase in Assam.