Co-WIN, India’s COVID-19 vaccination app, could soon be adopted by Guyana and would facilitate the country’s tracking efforts in real-time and also allow health officials to understand trends and patterns.
This is according to Health Minister, Dr. Frank Anthony, who spoke during his daily COVID-19 update on Wednesday.
Co-win, a medical database software, has been helping India track the rollout of its massive vaccination programme. It works by aggregating the vaccination tallies from each of the vaccination sites.
The Health Minister related that this software has been working well in India, ably helping that country to readily tally its vaccination numbers. And, he noted that the Government of India has offered this software to Guyana and a number of other countries.
According to the Economic Times in India, countries such as Canada, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Nigeria, Uganda, Vietnam, Iraq, Dominican Republic, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are interested in knowing about the Co-WIN platform for implementing it in their own countries to run their own Covid programmes.
On Wednesday, Dr. Anthony said, “We are very much interested in it because we believe that it would help us aggregate the numbers from the different sites… It would make aggregating the numbers very easy and it would help us track almost on a minute by minute basis how the vaccination is going because that is how the software is built.”
Guyana has a significantly smaller population than India and as such, has far fewer vaccination sites. Still, Dr. Anthony said that the software would be customised to match the local needs.
And, he said, “… we have been engaged in those talks.”
He also explained that the data already collected by health officials in the ongoing vaccination rollout- including information on the vaccine doses and biographical data- will be added to the software.
It is expected that the software will allow the local health authorities to visualise trends and patterns in the vaccination rollout.
Already, the local authorities joined a virtual global conclave of health and technology experts from across the world on July 5, where the software’s application and use were shared.
Since then, Dr. Anthony said that the local health authorities have been in contact with the Indian High Commissioner to Guyana, Dr. K. J. Srinivasa, indicating the country’s interest in the software. Engagements with the High Commissioner, the Health Minister said, has been “moving along nicely”.
