Identify under-repair freezers at vaccine stores, Centre tells Karnataka

The Centre on September 10, wrote to Karnataka to identify its under repair equipment at its vaccine stores across the state so as to ready cold chain capacity for storing Covid vaccines in the future.

Karnataka has 3,677 ice line refrigerators, 3,395 deep freezers, 10 walk in coolers and two walk in freezers. The state maintained that while this is adequate for existing routine immunisation programmes for storing vaccines like polio, measles rubella among others, it has to identify the under-repair equipment and apprise the Centre on equipment required based on the number of Covid doses that the Centre allocates to the state.

The state has 2,900 cold chain points. As many as 10.52 lakh children upto the age of 16 are vaccinated under routine immunisation programmes every year. But the health department is unsure of how many vaccine doses it can store at any given point of time.

"We haven't calculated what the maximum cold storage capacity is for vaccines in the state. However, what the Centre says in its letter to us is to use the same distribution network that we used for other vaccines, for example, Polio. But we need more storage space for Covid vaccines," Dr Rajani Nageshrao, Deputy Director, Immunisation, Department of Health and Family Welfare said. On October 6, a meeting was scheduled to be held with the Government of India to discuss the state's preparedness in vaccine storage.

While a small ice line refrigerator has a capacity of 140 litres and a large size refrigerator can store 300 litres, it is unknown how many of the state's refrigerators are small and how many are large sized. If one were to assume all refrigerators and coolers can store a minimum 140 litres then the total storage capacity of the state would be 5,16,180 litres. If we assume all refrigerators and coolers can store a maximum 300 litres then the total storage capacity of the state would be 11,06,100 litres.

"Since walk in freezers and deep freezers are maintained at a temperature of - 15°C to - 25°C, no vaccines are stored in them except oral polio vaccine, which will remain potent only if stored at temperature not higher than - 20°C. Cool packs that are required to pack the vaccines with during transportation are also stored in deep freezers," she said.

All other vaccines are stored between 2°C and 8°C. The Covid vaccine may need a temperature beyond what is provided in a simple refrigerator, as in a deep freezer or an ice line refrigerator.