VIJAYAWADA: Chief Minister Y. S. Jagan Mohan Reddy announced in State Legislative Assembly on Friday that Andhra Pradesh is getting ready to vaccinate one crore people against Coronavirus in three months, as the central government has indicated that it will release one crore doses of vaccine to AP in the first phase.
Replying to a discussion in assembly on Covid-19 and other health initiatives being taken up by the state government, the CM stated that as per guidelines of the centre, 3.6 lakh healthcare workers will be the first priority in getting the vaccination, followed by 7 lakh frontline staff of other departments and 90 lakh aged persons above 50 years of age. Accordingly, he said, the Health Department is gearing up for the vaccination programme.
The Chief Minister announced that nearly 4,065 cold chain facilities will be storing the vaccine at a temperature of between 2–8 degrees Celsius. Government has kept 29 refrigerated vehicles ready for transporting the vaccine, which will be administered to the one crore population by 19,000 ANMs. He asked health authorities to train Asha workers too about how the vaccine is to be injected into people.
Jagan Mohan Reddy said AP has a population of six crore. Until all people are vaccinated, he advised people to remain compliant with the requisite precautionary measures, like wearing face mask, maintaining social distance, washing hands with sanitisers and protecting oneself from getting infected with Coronavirus.
A state-level steering committee headed by the chief secretary and task forces at state, district and mandal levels are being set up to implement and monitor the vaccination programme in compliance with the stipulated Standard Operating Procedures.
Referring to the spike in number of Covid-19 positive cases due to prevalence of cold weather conditions, the CM pointed out that countries like the UK, France, Italy and states, such as New Delhi, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh are witnessing this phenomenon.
The CM dwelt at length on how infrastructure was skeletal in hospitals of the state when Coronavirus started spreading in March 2019. Not a single lab was available to conduct Covid-19 test in the early days. Since then, the state government has set up 150 labs and has conducted 1.02 crore tests so far. Andhra Pradesh stood first in the country by conducting 1,91,568 tests per one million population. Coronavirus positive rate has been brought down to 8.51 percent on an average from the earlier 16 percent. Rate of fatalities has been reduced to 0.81 percent from the earlier 1.46 percent by providing all requisite health care to virus-infected persons.
The Chief Minister pointed out that even now, a set of six doses of Remdesivir injections are available at each of the Covid-19 hospitals, besides 17,000 Tocilizumab injections at all district headquarter hospitals in the state for treating infected patients.
CM Jagan announced revamp of the entire health infrastructure in the state, besides setting up 16 new medical colleges in addition to the existing 11 colleges in AP at a cost of Rs. 16,000 crore in the next three years.
