The Guyana Government is in talks with India to acquire the Co-WIN software to better manage its Covid-19 vaccination drive, Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony has announced.
India developed Co-WIN as the central information technology system for strategising, implementing, monitoring and evaluating Covid vaccination. In fact, India had adopted a completely digital approach while planning its vaccination strategy so that people had a record of when, where and by whom they were vaccinated.
Recently, many countries have shown interest in using the platform and the Indian Government is willing to share the open-source software for free.
Several other countries, including Guyana, recently participated in a global conclave where ministers around the world were briefed on the technical details about the software.
Dr Anthony, during today’s Covid-19 update, explained that this programme will be very beneficial to Guyana.
“In order to track how many people have received the vaccine on a daily basis, they [India] have developed a software to be able to aggregate all these numbers from the different vaccination sites…we’re very much interested in it because we believe that it would help us to aggregate the numbers from the different sites that we have, currently we have about 100 sites. So, it would make aggregating these numbers quite easy and we will be able to track on a minute-by-minute basis how the vaccination is going,” the Health Minister explained.
He added that while local authorities are already collecting and analyzing data, this software is more user-friendly and better programmed to monitor trends and patterns relating to the novel coronavirus.
The Health Minister said the software will be customized to suit Guyana’s requirements, and once it becomes available, officials will input data already collected since the commencement of the local vaccination drive in February this year.
