Surokkha app launched for COVID vaccinators to verify information

The government has activated the Surokkha app for COVID-19 vaccinators to cross-check information.

The health workers will be able to use the app from Friday, Health Minister Zahid Maleque said at the launch in Dhaka’s Kurmitola General Hospital on Thursday.

Citizens over 40 years old and others who have been allocated the vaccine can still register for their doses only on www.surokkha.gov.bd.

The app has come as a “booster” when the government is carrying out the vaccination programme “smoothly” at over 4,000 booths in more than 1,000 centres nationwide, Maleque said at the ceremony.

He thanked State Minister for ICT Zunaid Ahmed Palak for the app. It will be available only on Google Play, for now.

Palak said India or any other country would have charged at least $5 million for such an app but the ICT Division programmers made Surokkha free of cost.

For the vaccinators, he said, the app has made the process of verifying vaccine recipients’ information easier. Health workers will now only need to scan the QR code on the vaccine cards of the recipients to verify the information.

TWO MILLION DOSES IN FEBRUARY

The Serum Institute of India is supplying 30 million doses of the vaccine developed by the UK’s Oxford University by Anglo-Swedish drugmaker AstraZeneca, to Bangladesh.

Officials said Bangladesh would get five million doses per month from Serum, the largest vaccine manufacturer in the world. The company delivered the doses for the first month at a time. 

But Nazmul Hassan, managing director of Beximco Pharmaceuticals, which is the exclusive distributor of the vaccine in Bangladesh, had said that Serum would send two to three million doses in the second batch.

Health Secretary Abdul Mannan on Wednesday said there was no doubt Bangladesh will get the five million doses in the next batch as per the deal.  

Health Minister Maleque on Thursday clarified that Serum would send two million doses in the first phase of the second batch in February and the rest in the following month.