Why getting vaccinated in India is exactly like going to a sold out concert
The government of India announced recently that all individuals above the age of 18 would now be eligible to get a vaccine. While they claimed this to be a great victory, they must’ve forgotten to mention that eligibility in itself didn’t mean availability.
What could come to follow is nothing short of what comics would regard as gold-standard in terms of content.
Most states delayed the rollout because of the unavailability of the vaccine. Can you imagine being out of stock on Day 1? And while the Government of India would correct you that they had launched it and that the first group of people have started getting their vaccines, the reality of the situation could not be more different.
According to some statistics, Bangalore has a population of close to 8 million (80 lakh) people between 18–44 years. For the said 80 lakh people, the slots released daily were in the mere hundreds. How do you ever plan to vaccinate 8 million people requiring 16 million doses while you release less than a thousand appoints a day??
But how do you decide who of the 8 million people get those vaccines?
In 2019, a friend of mine and I had decided to go to Bangkok to watch John Mayer play live there. The only problem was booking the tickets because we’d gotten word that they usually sell out in just minutes. So in the middle of the workday, my friend and I would spend hours refreshing the page every few minutes to check if the tickets had gone online.
Attempting to book a vaccination slot, in the middle of a pandemic no less felt an awful lot like booking those concert tickets.
To make things worse, some tech-savvy people had created Twitter handles and telegram groups and programed bots to constantly (every 1.2 seconds) refresh the page and send out an update should any slot open. What would happen next is that the 40 or so thousand members who received that notification would try to book slots for close to 100 or so thousand people since each number could get up to 4 individuals registered. So to say the chances were slim is an understatement. Some people had even gone on to do some analysis based on historical data of when slots would usually open up to predict when the following slots would be up.
So I decided to participate in this crazy game without any real hope of actually getting the slot. To be honest, the rush of getting the notification and attempting to book a slot was entertaining in itself. To my sheer luck, I managed to secure a slot (No- I could not believe it myself either) at a hospital on the last day before they cancelled the vaccinations for my age group. Barely a week into the vaccination drive, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and some other states decided to stop vaccination of adults below 45 entirely. Even supplying less than a thousand doses to cities of over 10 million people each was proving to be a challenge.
What I saw there, though, was as I’d expected. All appointments seemed to be made to technologically savvy, upper-class individuals who were able to beat the system- precisely the same type of people as me. Some people also used the strategy of booking slots at smaller towns and villages as far as even 100km outside the city to get their jabs. Small government health clinics, schools, and other vaccination centres set up in rural parts of Bangalore now saw city folk coming in to get their vaccine, depriving the locals of their chances of getting the jab, often much to their ire. But the question is, did they even stand a chance?
For the answer to be yes, we would have to assume that they have at least some form of identification documents, a smartphone, a stable mobile connection, a working internet connection, have heard of the telegram group and Twitter pages, be able to access these social media platforms, be able to often in the middle of the workday access the Co-Win portal to book their slots within 10 seconds of the notification going our etc. So let’s be honest, they never really even stood a chance, to begin with.
Seeing such an unrepresentative sample of the population at vaccination centres, I could not help but wonder how incredibly rigged this system is and how it is simply widening the gap between the haves and the have nots.
I always knew that India’s tech prowess would come back to bite humanity someday. I just didn’t expect it to be this soon.
