EXPLAINED | How To Register For Covid-19 Vaccine In India With Govt's Co-WIN App

The government during a press conference stated that the application will be used to help agencies track the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.

(Representative Image/ Getty)

New Delhi: The Union Government in March, to help citizens track the number of positive COVID-19 cases around them, started working on the CoWIN-20 mobile application. Later, the app was launched as Aarogya Setu, which currently has more than 10-crore downloads on the play store. After the launch of Aarogya Setu, the work of Co-WIN still remains in progress, but with a different purpose. What is the purpose of the Co-WIN mobile application? The government during a press conference stated that the application will be used to help agencies track the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines as well as enable citizens of the country to register for the vaccination process. The application will help in tracking and registration for the Covid-19 vaccine and has five modules namely, administrator module, registration module, vaccination module, beneficiary acknowledgment module, and report module. "It will upload bulk data on co-morbidity provided by local authorities or by surveyors," the government said. With the Co-WIN app, the government wants to make the distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine smooth in the country. How To Register For Covid-19 Vaccine With Co-WIN App? Citizens who are not frontline health workers will be able to register for the vaccine via the registration module. After registration, administrators who have registered through the Administrator module for conducting vaccination sessions will be notified and will further create sessions and the respective vaccinators and managers. After getting the notification, the vaccination module will verify beneficiary details and update vaccination status. The beneficiary acknowledgment 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. Other Features of the app Apart from tracking vaccination, the mobile app would also send real-time data of the 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. Availability of the mobile application The Co-WIN mobile application is still under development, and the government is yet to share its availability details on Google Play Store, and Apple App Store. It is also expected that the app may also launch on Jio Phones that run on the KaiOS Update on the Covid-19 vaccine It is expected that the vaccination drive for the Covid-19 pandemic in India is likely to begin soon, as three vaccine makers, Pfizer, Serum Institute of India (SII), Bharat Biotech have applied for emergency use authorizations of their respective vaccine candidates. Meanwhile, Zydus Cadila’s ZyCovD and Sputnik V which was developed in Russia, are doing rounds of human trials in the country, and are expected to apply for approval very soon. It is also worth mentioning that, according to the government, frontline healthcare workers would get the anti-Covid-19 vaccine shot on a priority basis.