A relatively strong performance between Monday and Friday of last week means we are likely to have hit our vaccination target last week, breaking the Government’s nearly month-long record of missing weekly targets, but it looks like we will miss our target for vaccinating those at “very high risk” but younger than 70.
Last week’s target has been reduced to 84,000 after we missed our target of 92,000 the week before. That target was itself a reduction from a target of 100,000 for the week of the 15th.
Between Monday the 8th and Friday the 12th, the last day we have date for, we administered 76,466 doses. Previous weeks have seen the number peak over Wednesday and Thursday before declining sharply over the weekends, but we are likely to have hit the 84,000 even with reduced weekend numbers.
The total number of doses administered, as of the 12th, was 606,904, with 443,092 of those being the 1st dose, and 163,819 of those being 2nd doses. The average number of doses administered per day, over the last seven days, is now 12,419.
Whilst we likely hit the weekly vaccination target a closer look at the data suggests we will not hit out target for administering vaccinations to Cohort 4. 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, as of Friday we had administered 3,295.
At current trends we will fail to hit the Government’s target of administering 1,250,000 doses by the end of March by a substantial amount. Hitting this week’s target would see us having administered 609,768 doses by the end of this week. That gives us slightly more than 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.
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. 135,109 of these had received their first dose as of the 12th 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.