India Has COVID-19 Vaccine On Its Mind, As 80 Lakh Register In 3 Hours

Today was a rather disappointing day for most Indians over the age of 18 years who were excited to get registered and eventually vaccinated to safeguard themselves from the novel coronavirus.

Reuters

Also Read: CoWin App Crashes: Above 18 Users Report Server Error In Covid Vaccine Signup

But the Indian government and the CoWin app had other plans for us. Engulfed with severe technical issues, the registration process that was expected to commence today at 4:00 PM turned into a fiasco of epic proportions (something our nation sadly is experiencing on a day to day basis).

According to TRAI's RS Sharma, around 80 lakh Indians registered to get vaccinated after registrations opened on CoWin.gov.in after 4 pm today.

There have been 79,65,720 registrations on Co-WIN today, most of these in the last three hours (16:00-19:00) and mostly of 18-44 age group. We have seen a traffic of 55,000 hits per second. System functioning as expected. pic.twitter.com/AgLt3fMB7Z

¡ª RS Sharma (@rssharma3) April 28, 2021

This is according to data available by 8 PM IST, where RS Sharma also claimed around 55,000 people trying to register every second during peak load. Despite his observation of "system functioning as expected," quite a few people actually faced a lot of issues in the rush to register online on CoWin.gov.in app.

Indiatimes

Seeing the India we live in today, with the number of cases and deaths due to COVID-19 continuing to skyrocket with each passing day, most individuals are eager to get themselves vaccinated. And this was also seen in Google¡¯s search trends for today.

On Google Trends, I looked for data for three keywords that I figured people would have looked at to search for vaccine registrations -- Cowin, Covid vaccine and vaccine -- for the past day.

Also Read: CoWin And Maps: How To Find COVID-19 Vaccination Centres Near You

Google trends showing India¡¯s interest in getting vaccinated

Google Trends data showed that at exactly 12:00 AM last night, when many people thought registrations for the COVID-19 vaccine in India would commence, search value for keywords Cowin, covid vaccine and vaccine spiked considerably, showing a search value of 26, 12 and 27 respectively.

Google

Throughout the day, these keywords have been around 18,9 and 19 respectively. However, as soon as the clock hit four the search value skyrocketed, going 100, 21 and 38 respectively.

Google

Comparing this with data from a month ago, these same keywords were averaging out at 36, 51 and 100 respectively.

Also Read: How People Over Age 18 Can Register For COVID-19 Vaccination In India

Statewise use of keywords

Today, the keyword CoWin was most searchers by the state of Kerala with a search value of 100 followed by West Bengal at 57 and Uttarakhand at 52. Delhi came fourth with a search value of 50 and Odisha came fifth with a value of 47.

Google

For the keyword vaccine, Kerala again topped this list with a search value of 100 followed by Daman and Diu at 59, Uttarakhand at 55, Delhi at 51 and Maharashtra at 48.

Google

Keyword covid vaccine saw Kerala again topping the list with a search value of 100 followed by Uttarakhand at 43, Delhi at 40, Daman and Diu at 37 and Telangana at 36.

Google

CoWin registration issues

Sadly, this excitement and I daresay, desperation was met with a rather poor response with the CoWin site crashing at the very first minute it opened its gates, people were greeted with server errors, while many were unable to even receive an OTP on their phones.

Iindiatimes

Some lucky people who did manage to get OTPs and register themselves, when arrived at the scheduling page, the centres had restricted the vaccination to people over 45+ years, wrestling the whole premise to be pointless.

What¡¯s next?

A few minutes later, Aarogya Setu¡¯s official Twitter handle that vaccine scheduling will only be possible once the state governments and private vaccination centres decide to do so.

Vaccination appointments for 18 plus will be possible once the State Governments and Private Vaccination Centers schedule Vaccination sessions. Registration is happening on https://t.co/S3pUooMbXX.

¡ª Aarogya Setu (@SetuAarogya) April 28, 2021

This only makes us think one thing -- if the states and private vaccination centres weren¡¯t ready for scheduling vaccinations, why did they announce the registration so prematurely? Maybe by registering early, the governments can get a clearer picture of the demand to have available stock at all times, but even that wasn¡¯t executed appropriately.

There are many states that have announced that they currently don¡¯t have vaccines in stock -- states like Rajasthan have announced that they will commence vaccinations starting May 15 (as stated by Health Minister Raghu Sharma) as they await their order of 125 million doses from SII.

Maharashtra government on the other hand has announced that due to the shortage of vaccines, it won¡¯t be commencing its drive starting May 1.

Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Punjab along with a few other states have already announced that (according to an India Today report) they won¡¯t be commencing the vaccination drive starting next month due to a shortage of vaccine doses.

How was your experience registering for the vaccine? Tell us in the comments below.