Between Monday and Wednesday of this week, the last days we have data for, only 21,851 doses of vaccine were administered; a reduction of 47% on the numbers administered over the same period the week before. The slowdown comes after Sunday of last week saw only 303 vaccines administered, the lowest daily total recorded since the HSE began releasing daily vaccination data.
The total number of doses administered, as of the 17th, was 639,586, with 468,586 of those being the 1st dose, and 171,258 of those being 2nd doses. The average number of doses administered per day, over the last seven days, is now 9,651, the lowest it has been since the 18th of February.
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.
We still, as of the 17th, have not hit last week’s target for vaccinating 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, we missed that target by over 50%, and we had still only administered 4,608 vaccines up to Wednesday.
We are on track to miss our target of administering 1.25 million doses by the end of March by a substantial margin. We had 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. Between the 15th and 17th we instead administered 21,851 vaccines, less than 20% of what was required.
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. 154,465 of these had received their first dose as of the 17th 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.