Covid19 Vaccination Experience (Inoculated on 12th May '21)

Sharing my experience here hoping it can be useful to others who are looking at inoculating soon. I got myself vaccinated at CV Raman Nagar General Hospital, Bangalore on 12th May '21.

Getting a slot is hard and you need to do it in the co-win portal. Slots open up randomly and you need to sit and track it. There are multiple apps which are snooping the co-win API and giving notifications- Paytm, HealthifyMe, VaccinateMe etc but nothing really worked for us. The status was always delayed and slots were taken. What worked are the Telegram groups which again had integrated co-win API and gave push messages. I don't know why they were able to do it faster when slots were available. 

Once the slot opens up, co-win portal will require you to register after selecting the hospital, date and time slot. If you are someone well versed with booking tatkal tickest on IRCTC, you will do well with co-win 😉 There are 2 registrations- one registering to the portal with your phone number and second registering for the vaccine by selecting the slot. You are not registered till you get assigned a hospital location, time slot, registration number and a secret PIN. You will also be asked to give a document as ID proof. Though there are multiple options, I will recommend using Aadhaar card since you will anyway be asked to update the Aadhaar number at the location.

Pro tip: Use the co-win website rather than the app for booking and sit somewhere where you get good mobile reception to get OTP immediately.

We reached the hospital at 8:20 AM for the 10:00 AM slot. There were 2 lines of around 150 people waiting for the jab. After some moving around, we figured out that the lines were for 18-45 years 1st jab and 45+ 2nd jab. So I started my vaccine day as person number 80 in the 18-45 years line. 

By 9 AM, hospital authorities came and announced that only people who took appointments on co-win app at CV Raman Nagar General Hospital on 12th May '21 will get the jab. Hearing that and after a bit of requests, all the walk-in hopefuls left. I became person number 50 in the line and token issue started.

Hospital authorities soon found out there were people who registered only on the portal and never registered for the vaccine / slot / hospital. They refused to issue tokens to them and asked them to leave. I became person number 20 in the line and got my token.

The hospital staff who felt bad about the people leaving told me that they only have a ration of 270 vaccines and they are distributing it as 120 for the 2nd jab of 45 years+ and 150 for 1st jab of 18-45 years. So they have to strictly follow the policies set and hence only giving to registered individuals.

Once in, hospital had managed the process very well. We first waited till our turn came and then went to a verification desk. The employee used our registered phone number to track our slot and verify our identify using our Aadhaar cards. They also asked all the people who had gotten a token by lying that they had a slot to leave. I became person number 10 in the line and proceeded to vaccination.

The vaccine was given by a nurse who handed us 2 paracetamol saying eat it if you get fever. They asked us to move to the next room for 15 minutes to check any adverse reaction. Soon after waiting, we left the place. On our way back, police stopped the car and asked why we are roaming around to which we showed the appointment transcript. There were not barricades when we traveled in the morning may be because it was early in the morning.

Overall, on-ground the drive is well managed especially was happy to see the spic and span way in which government hospital was managed and how well the staff went about doing this. So please don't delay your jab waiting for your favourite private hospital to open up. The toughest part of the entire process is find the slot. If you don't have an expert like my wife to help you, its hard to get that part done. Kudos to her for getting this done for us :)