Guyana to begin using India’s CoWIN software

− to track Covid vaccination data

Minister of Health, Dr. Frank Anthony MP says Guyana will soon be able to better track vaccination data when it begins using the Indian Covid Vaccine Intelligence Network (CoWIN) vaccination tracking software.  

During Wednesday’s COVID-19 Update, Dr. Anthony said he recently attended a virtual conclave of health and technology experts from various countries where India shared how the system works.

“As you know in India, they have been doing mass vaccination and millions of people have already received the vaccine. However, to track how many people that receive the vaccine on a daily basis they have developed a software to be able to aggregate all these numbers from the different vaccination sites, that software is called CoWIN and it has been working very good in India.

So, the Government of India has decided that they want to make the software available to countries who would like to use it. And they made such an offer to the Government of Guyana. We are very much interested in it because we believe that it would help us to aggregate the numbers of, you know, from the different sites that we have, currently we have about 100 sites,” Minister Anthony said.

The Health Minister said the software will be tailored for local use.

“We’ll be able to track almost on a minute-by-minute basis how the vaccination is going because that’s how the software is, [and]of course there will be customising it to suit our purposes here in Guyana.”

The Economic Times of India reported that over 50 countries, from central Asia, Latin America and Africa have shown interest in the CoWIN app. The report also stated that India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has directed officials to create an open-source version of the platform and give it free of cost to any country that wants it.

Meanwhile, Minister Anthony says Guyana’s vaccination record keeping has been quite comprehensive and additional information than what is already being collected would not be necessary for the CoWIN app to function effectively here.

“Not only do we have the name of the person, address and telephone numbers and so forth, but we have also been tracking the vaccine, type of vaccine, batch number, serial number and a whole host of other technical things that are required. So, we have very comprehensive information but the information is not in a user-friendly manner and that’s what this software is going to change.

When we get the software, we will be able to input all this data that we have already collected, and of course, those persons who are now coming to the centres, we can do that directly.”

Minister Anthony said the software will allow the ministry to observe a lot of trends and patterns in the vaccination process, which will contribute positively to the current process, and would also be useful for future reference.