In a bid to further strengthen the COVID-19 vaccination drive, the Health Ministry has partnered up with Google to help eligible beneficiaries find a nearby vaccination centre.
The Health Ministry informed that users will be able to know more information about vaccine availability and appointments for more than 13,000 locations across the country powered by real-time data from the CoWIN APIs (application programming interfaces). This includes information such as availability of appointment slots at each centre, vaccines and doses offered (dose 1 or dose 2), expectations for pricing (paid or free) and the link to the CoWIN website for booking.
Taking to his microblogging site Union Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya tweeted, “The Ministry of Health has taken yet another significant initiative to enhance access to #COVID19 vaccine: Search ‘covid vaccine near me’ on Google, Check availability of slots & more, Use ‘Book Appointment’ feature to book a slot.”
He added that this information will be automatically displayed when users search for nearby vaccine centres or any specific area on Google Search, Maps, and Google Assistant.
In addition to English, users can also search in eight Indian languages, including Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati, and Marathi.
So far the Health Ministry had administered 65.41 crore vaccines to Indian residents under the National Immunization drive. The vaccine count crossed 1 crore administrations in a single day on August 27 following which another milestone was clocked today after the ministry recorded 1.33 crore vaccinations yesterday.
