Only 303 vaccines were administered last Sunday, the 14th. The low numbers were likely caused by the Government’s decision to ignore the advice of the European Medicines Agency and stop the administration of AstraZeneca vaccines. The Government has now reversed that decision, but has said that it will be late next week before use of the AZ vaccines can begin again due to administrative delays.
Despite the low numbers of Sunday we hit the week’s target of administering 84,000 doses of vaccines, administering 85,968 over the week. This was the first time in a month that the Government has hit its vaccination target.
Despite this, we are still on track to miss our target of administering 1.25 million doses by the end of March by a substantial margin. We have roughly two weeks, March 15th to 31st, to administer more vaccines than have been administered over the entire length of the vaccination programme to date – 640,232. Doing that would require us to administer 37,660 doses a day on all 17 days, more than three times the current rate.
The total number of doses administered, as of the 15th, was 620,580, with 455,182 of those being the 1st dose, and 165,398 of those being 2nd doses. The average number of doses administered per day, over the last seven days, is now 11,628.
Whilst we hit the weekly vaccination target a closer look at the data shows we failed to hit our target for Cohort 4 vaccinations by nearly 60%. Cohort 4 consists of people “aged 16-69 at very high risk.” We were expected to administer 10,000 doses of vaccines to people in this Cohort last week, we actually administered only 4,157 over the week.
Monday the 15th saw GPs begin to administer vaccines to people aged 85 and older, who are part of “Cohort 3” in the Government’s vaccination schedule. The CSO estimates that there are 490,000 people to be vaccinated in Cohort 3, which also includes those 70 and older who are not in long-term residential care. 142,306 of these had received their first dose as of the 15th of March.
Daily reporting of vaccinating numbers only goes back to the 3rd of February, meaning that the 9th of February is the earliest day from which we can show total doses administered over a seven-day period. On the 9th of February, the daily average number of doses administered was 5,642, with 39,495 doses having been administered between the 3rd and the 9th.