Explained: Here's How You Will Be Able to Register for Covid-19 Vaccine in India With Co-WIN App

Back in March, the Central government started working on a new mobile app namely CoWin-20 to help citizens track the number of positive COVID-19 cases around them. The app was later launched as Aarogya Setu that currently has over ten crore downloads on Google Play Store. But the erstwhile Co-WIN app remains to be still in the works, but with a different purpose. Now, the government during a press conference earlier this week explained the functionality of the Co-WIN app, that is, primarily to help agencies track the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines as well as enable citizens of the country to register for the vaccination process.

To ensure smooth tracking and registration for COVID-19 vaccine, the Co-WIN app is divided into five modules namely administrator module, registration module, vaccination module, beneficiary acknowledgement module, and report module. Citizens who are not frontline health workers will be able to register for the vaccine via the registration module. “It will upload bulk data on co-morbidity provided by local authorities or by surveyors," the government had explained.

Then through the Administrator module on the Co-WIN app, administrators who’d be conducting these vaccination sessions, will further create sessions and the respective vaccinators and managers will be notified. Whereas, the vaccination module will verify beneficiary details and update vaccination status. The beneficiary acknowledgement module will send SMS to beneficiaries and also generate QR-based certificates after one gets vaccinated. The report module will prepare reports of how many vaccine sessions have been conducted, how many people have attended those, how many people have dropped out etc. Union Health Secretary Rajesh Bhushan during the press briefing had stated that the Co-WIN mobile app would also send real-time data of temperature of the cold-storage facilities to the main server. This is mainly an expansion of the Electronic Vaccine Intelligence Network (eVIN) system that was launched in September this year.

The vaccination drive for COVID-19 pandemic in India will likely begin with three vaccine-makers – Pfizer, Serum Institute of India, Bharat Biotech – having applied for emergency use authorisation of their vaccine candidates. Union Health Secretary Bhushan during the press briefing had added that roughly one crore frontline healthcare workers would get the anti-coronavirus vaccine on a priority basis. However, citizens will still be able to register themselves for the programme, though they might receive it some months later. With the Co-WIN app, the government wants to make the distribution of COVID-19 vaccine smooth in the country. At the moment, the Co-WIN is still under development, and the government is yet to share its availability details on Google Play Store, and Apple App Store. The app may also launch on Jio phones that run on KaiOS.

(with inputs from PTI)

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