 "Mumbai airport delivers 274,400 doses of Covishield vaccine to 22 cities")
The Mumbai airport on Wednesday said it is facilitating the delivery of about 2,72,400 doses of the Covishield vaccine to 22 domestic destinations on the first of commencement of flights carrying COVID-19 vaccines from the city.
Earlier in the day, the country's second busiest airport commenced transportation of the vaccines with low-cost carrier GoAir's first flight to Goa.
This came a day after a massive pan-India inoculation drive against COVID-19 was set in process with more than 56 lakh doses of the Covishield vaccine leaving Pune for 13 cities across the country.
The vaccinations are scheduled to begin on January 16.
As part of the momentous mission, CSMIA will facilitate the distribution of a total of 227 boxes containing about 2,72,400 doses of the vaccine, the private airport operator said in a statement on Wednesday.
These shipments are being carried out by SpiceJet, IndiGo, GoAir and Vistara. These will be delivered to Goa, Bagdogra, Rajkot, Ranchi, Imphal, Agartala, Cochin, Bhopal, Kanpur, Jammu, Srinagar, Lucknow, Chandigarh, Gorakhpur, Raipur, Dehradun, Varanasi, Indore, Trivandrum and Jabalpur, it said.
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The first vaccine shipment departed from the airport at 5:20 am to Goa through GoAir carrying two boxes of the vaccine, followed by a flight to Rajkot at 6:00 am, which carried seven boxes of the vaccines and was operated by SpiceJet, CSMIA said.
The Mumbai airport has facilities such as Asia's largest temperature-controlled export pharma excellence centre and pharma-dedicated import cold zone, and a first-of-its-kind 'cooltainer' facility, it said.
Additionally, it has an exclusive station dealing with storage and maintenance of both e-type, and t-type active containers that help facilitate the seamless distribution of vaccines across India.
The airport has placed a well-defined process for the faster turnaround of COVID-19 vaccine EXIM and transhipment movements, CSMIA said.
It added that the standard operating procedures (SOPs) implemented by the airport in anticipation of the vaccine distribution saw the terminal register a cargo processing time of just seven minutes, right from goods acceptance to dispatch at ramp, it added.
Besides, the airport has deployed a dedicated COVID-19 task force in order to reduce dwell time and facilitate advanced planning and collaboration between the airport and all stakeholders in this process, said the release.