Vijayawada: The Andhra Pradesh government will administer anti-Covid-19 jab to students and employees aged below 45 years and going abroad for study or work.
Disclosing this here on Wednesday, principal secretary (health) Anil Kumar Singhal said that based on a direction from Chief Minister Y.S Jagan Mohan Reddy to vaccinate all those below 45 years going abroad for study and work in order to avoid any trouble to them. Guidelines had been issued to District Collectors to provide vaccination to such people. However, as some Collectors took to the notice of the government that some students and employees, who went abroad, were facing trouble as their vaccine certificate showed only their Aadhaar number, the government took it up with the union ministry of health to make some changes in CoWIN app to accept passport number while issuing the vaccination certificate. He said that the authorities responded positively and added that, accordingly, those going abroad should feed their passport number instead of Aadhaar number on the CoWIN app once the Centre made the requisite changes.
Meanwhile, the state government took a decision to hike stipend to senior resident doctors to Rs 70,000 from Rs 45,000 per month. The resident doctors boycotted all their duties including Covid care on Tuesday all over the state in protest against the inordinate delay in revising their stipend.
Singhal said that the state government had decided to hike the monthly stipend of senior residents to Rs 70,000 from the present Rs 45,000. He added that as PG final year and MBBS students had also sought a hike in their stipend, they discussed the issue with Chief Secretary. He said that 350 senior resident doctors joined duty last September and 800 PG students submitted representations for hike in stipend and added that a decision on their request would be taken in a week’s time.
With regard to consumption of medical oxygen in the state, the senior official stated that it had come down to 443 metric tonnes in the last 24 hours as against Centre’s allocation of 590 tonnes per day. He announced that 1.82 crore doses of Covid vaccine were administered to the people in the state by Tuesday evening.
