India’s massive COVID-19 vaccination drive hit by glitches in app

India’s massive COVID-19 vaccination drive was impacted by glitches in an app used to coordinate the campaign. Many health workers, who were due to receive a vaccine on Saturday, did not get the message via an app developed by the government called Co-WIN.

This resulted in several states to either reschedule their sessions or temporarily take the process offline at the cost of operational efficiency. Rajesh Tope, public health minister, pointed out that at a video conference with the Union Health Minister on Saturday evening to give feedback on the first day of vaccination, Maharashtra and other states had raised the Co-WIN malfunction issue. “Since the Centre has made it mandatory for the entire process to be online, the drive cannot resume unless the problems with the app are rectified,” he said.

The app Co-WIN is supposed to alert healthcare workers, who are first in line to get shots. It also allows officials to monitor and manage the entire program. However, a senior official at the health department of Maharashtra told Reuters that they were planning to vaccinate 28,500 people on Saturday, but could only do 18,328 because of glitches in the app.

In Punjab and Karnataka, vaccination continued with mostly manual data entry as communication hiccups resulted in confusion and kept away many among those listed for the shot. A senior official in Chandigarh said the Centre had permitted the Punjab government to manually maintain immunisation data for now and later feed the information into the central server. The state government decided that all 59 designated centres would individually contact the 100 frontline health workers each registered for inoculation on Monday to avoid any communication gap.

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“When the health department tried to send confirmation texts to those registered for vaccination on Monday, the central server was simultaneously sending messages to the mobile phones of those who could not be vaccinated on Saturday,” the official said. In Karnataka, none among the 13,408 people vaccinated on Saturday received the digital certificate that the Co-WIN app is meant to send. In other states as well, several healthcare workers did not get texts on Friday confirming their place in queue. As a result, they didn’t turn up. “This glitch was a major reason, besides hesitancy, for the low numbers,” the official said.