We did 770K vaccinations today (not sure how many first doses. Maybe 350K... (
EDIT: it was 349K; Now 14.2M doses given to 11.8M people)... Today was the last day for the HCW (healthcare workers) and HLW (Frontline workers) priority vaccination. Saturday and Sunday are off days now for the national vaccination portal to upgrade to CoWin.Version2... from Monday March 1st onward, the general public vaccinations (for those over age 65 and 50-65 with co-morbidities) start
Here is an articles with details on the enormous event that is about to start --
Second phase of Covid-19 vaccination drive from March 1: All you need to know (Times of India)
10000 government hospitals (which are all already active) and 12000 private hospitals (I think most are not active yet) are sites for vaccination "sessions". The whole massive operation has what the ministry defines as "sessions" at the core of it. Each session has 100 scheduled injections. Most sites so far have been having 1 session a day but I think some have had more than 1 too (like a 4 hour in the morning and 4 hour in the afternoon; or maybe two sessions at the same site that overlap on time period; not sure). Anyway, the ministry has been reporting the number of sessions every day. And the total divided by sessions have been somewhere in the 55-60 range - meaning 100 people were expected but 55 or 60 showed up on average.
We had 801K this Thursday in 14.6K sessions (at around 10K government hospitals if I am not mistaken), at 55 per session. I think that was the highest total jabs so far on any day.
With private hospitals also pressed in, and hopefully more sessions at some of the existing sites, I think our session count could soon go up to 25K or so per day, and hopefully 75 or 80 shots per session for about 2 million per day rather quickly. That is where we need to be, from prettty much next week. That would mean about 1.2 million new individuals vaccinated per day and about 7 million per week. That is about 3 times the rate now, but it still won't be enough. We may need to go up to 50K sessions per day in a month or two. Then we will be getting somewhere.
Some way or other, we need to see at least 30M to 40M individuals vaccinated in March and then 50M+ in April to reach 100M by the end of April (we are at 12M now). Can we do that? Looks like we can... but will we?... We need to wait and see.
[By the way, take a look at this document from the Central Ministry from the end of December -
Covid19 vaccines: Operational Guidelines to get an idea of how much planning has gone into it. The details of the single national vaccine portal and app developed by then are actually quite impressive (pages 45-59) and show the enormity of the task and the complexities involved. Despite the best attempts by our press to act like the portal was a problem, it doesn't seem to have been. Only Maharashtra complained and had to lose a day or two at the start- and they had some legitimate issues at the beginning, but that got handled. Since the Mamatas and Pinarayis have not complained, I think the portal has been working without too much of hitches. That is an achievement. Now we go to its version 2]
... Good, good 
