The excitement for getting vaccinated on Day 1 of the third phase of mass vaccination drive turned into a chaos when the CoWIN portal kept shutting down intermittently while processing the vaccination exercise, according to several hospitals who complained while speaking to IANS.
For those who came early for registration on-site and those who did their self registration through the portal resulted into long hour delays on the portal.
To control the crowd waiting for their turn to get vaccinated against the Covid-19 virus many hospitals like Moolchand closed their walk-in registration as early as 1 p.m.
However, the medical Superintendent at south Delhi-based Moolchand Hospital, Madhu Handa also complained that the CoWIN portal is crashing every now and then.
On the other hand many of them alleged that they were not informed that the vaccination would start from 12 noon.
Jaswinder Singh from Gurugram, who brought along his father and father-in-law to Moolchand Hospital said that he has been waiting for over two hours. My parents are above 80 years of age and they are forced to stand in a queue. There is no management,” he said.
A 70-year-old Tarkeshwar Rana, who has been in the queue for vaccination since 10.30 a.m said, “I chose private facility for better convenience. If this is the situation here, god knows how things will unfold at government centres.”
A senior doctor from a large private hospital told IANS, “We have the capacity to manage but the delay caused in vaccination is making them anxious. Besides, the staff deployed from the government is also not cooperating.”
The situation was similar from Moolchand Hospital to other hospitals. However, many hospitals reported same experience and blamed the technical issues of CoWIN.