Giving a further boost to the ongoing COVID vaccination drive, Punjab Government on Monday announced to launch a special campaign to inoculate all the students above 18 years of age and staffers, both administrative and academic, at the colleges across state.
For the purpose, special camps would be held at the colleges and all eligible students and staffers would be given the first dose of the vaccine within July itself.
The decision was taken at the 96th meeting of the Health Sector Response and Procurement Committee, chaired by the Chief Secretary Vini Mahajan.
She asked the Health and Family Welfare Department to appoint a team at the state as well as district levels for weekly review of the COVID positivity data in order to sound an alert whenever the positivity rate rises anywhere in the state.
She also asked the Principal Secretary (Health) Hussan Lal to appoint a nodal officer to ensure optimum utilisation of COVID-related health infrastructure in the state at the earliest.
Calling for aggressive contact tracing and testing to keep the virus surge under control, the Chief Secretary asked the Health Department to ensure complete accuracy in entering and updating the testing data on COVA mobile app by all districts and the same must also be reflected in the daily Covid report.
Mahajan directed the Medical Education Department to take up the matter with the Centre for further ramping up of facilities at the PGI satellite centre in Sangrur and AIIMS in Bathinda to make them robust to tackle the much-anticipated third COVID wave.