By close of business Monday the 22nd the Government had administered 690,449 vaccines, meaning they only have nine days left in which to administer 559,551 vaccines if they wish to hit their original target of administering 1.25m vaccines by the end of March.
We would need to administer 62,172 vaccines every day between Tuesday the 22nd and Wednesday the 31st of March in order to achieve that number. On Monday the 22nd, the last day we have data for, we administered just 9,579 vaccines.
It appears clear that we will miss the March target by a rather substantial amount.
The Government has blamed this on supply issues, and that is certainly part of the issue, but Department of Health figures show that, as of the start of this week, there were 175,345 unused vaccines in the country – we had received 855,360 vaccines as of last Sunday, but had only administered 680,015 by that date. More deliveries are expected to be this week and next.
The total number of doses administered, as of the 22nd, was 690,449, with 503,796 of those being the 1st dose, and 186,653 of those being 2nd doses. The average number of doses administered per day, over the last seven days, is now 9,691.
More than two weeks ago the Government set a target of administering 10,000 vaccines to people in Cohort 4 each week. Cohort 4 consists of people “aged 16-69 at very high risk.” After more than two full weeks we have only administered 8,740 vaccines to people in this Cohort, not the over 20,000 we should have.
Monday the 15th of February 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. 179,918 of these had received their first dose as of the 22nd 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.