I Got My First Dose of Covishield Today

 Like most of us I failed to register on the Cowin site in the morning today.  The problem that I and most of us faced, was non-delivery of the verification code through SMS.  So I gave up and took my car, that had been serviced yesterday, for a test drive.  I drove up to a nearby hospital, Shekhar Hospital, and walked in to enquire about the vaccination.  Enquiry revealed that Shekhar was offering Covaxin.  I was further told that all slots for the day were taken up and that I could register for a slot on 4th March.  It seems there will be a two day break for taking stock and fine-tuning the processes.  I drove back home without registering.

Then I got a phone call from my nephew, who is a journalist and was doing a story on vaccination at Ram Manohar Lohia Institute, now renamed Atal Bihari Bajpayee University of Medicine.  He said that the queue there wasn't too long and things seemed to be proceeding smoothly.  He advised us to visit the place before they ran out of vaccine stock.  I drove down to the University with my wife and sister, all three of us armed with our Aadhaar cards.

There were several booths set up there and the process was like this: 

a) Get a token from the reception desk giving you the booth number and serial number, 

b) Go to the booth, fill out a card giving your name and contact details, 

c) Present the card and your Aadhaar to a person who will register you, 

d) After successful registration enter the booth and get the jab, check that the nurse has entered the date for the second jab on the card,

e) On exit get your particulars entered in a manual register maintained by another person, 

f) Wait for half an hour, and if there are no adverse effects, sign the manual register and depart.

To ensure that you don't face any hiccups, keep these things in mind:

• The jab is given in the shoulder muscle, so men should wear a half-sleeved or sleeveless T and women should have a sleeveless top.  Else, you may be asked to take off the shirt or the blouse.
• While filling out the card take care to mention the same phone number that is registered with your Aadhaar card, else the registration may fail.  I may add that no biometric or SMS based authentication was carried out.

A very interesting observation was that a couple of people who had successfully registered through website or the app, were sent away by the person doing the registration.  They were told to wait for a message from the system telling them the date and venue for their vaccination.  One gentleman was very upset at this, kept arguing and holding up the queue, and finally left saying that he will never set foot there again!  Same was the case with an important looking lady who was escorted by two policemen.  It seems she could seek some intervention and get the jab.  There was just one more case of jumping the queue assisted by someone who seemed to be a staff.

But for the general aversion to forming orderly queues, things went well and it seems that the walk-in is a better alternative to pre-registration.  The person who carries out the registration hardly takes two minutes per person.

Before I close, I must mention a very strange issue in the systems.  Today the system was rejecting all those born in the year 1960!  It seems the programmer has used greater than 60 as a condition instead of greater than or equal to.  If so, this is too silly a mistake to be made by a programmer.

I have already received an SMS saying that I have been successfully vaccinated and also giving a link to view the certificate on the site.  The certificate is fine except that it mentions my year of birth as 31 making me 90 years old!  It is incorrect in the case of my wife and my sister too.  This is puzzling as our DOBs are correctly registered in the Aadhaar database.

And finally, it is nearly 5 hours after I got the jab and I am feeling fit and fine.  The only regret is that I could not go for the same vaccine as our PM, but then I now have a tinge of Oxford within me. :)

Wishing you happy inoculation.