COVID jabs will be administered at a rate of 500,000 a WEEK as the programme ramps up, the head of Ireland’s vaccine rollout said yesterday.
Professor Brian MacCraith of the High Level Vaccine task force said that as supply increases here so will resources to speed up getting the jabs into people’s arms.
The vaccine update comes as a further 738 coronavirus cases and 13 COVID-19 related deaths were confirmed yesterday.
Ireland’s death toll now stands at 4,313 while there have been a total of 218,980 cases here.
Prof MacCraith added that vaccines will be administered seven days a week once the supply is greatly increased in the second and third quarter of the year.
He told RTE’s Katie Hannon: “It all comes down to the stability of the supply.
“At the moment there are 37 (vaccine centres) that have been identified. A number of the larger vaccination centres are already being used. On a 12-hour day, seven-day week those large centres can do up to 35,000 vaccinations a week.
“The limitation will only be supply. The infrastructure, resources and people will scale up to maximum supplies. So when we get into at least a million (vaccine doses) a month in quarter two and closer to two million in quarter three the infrastructure will match that.”
And HSE chief Paul Reid said there was “continued improvement” in hospital figures with 550 yesterday hospitalised with coronavirus, 135 of which were in ICU.
However Reid added that there was hope the country was turning a corner with cases dropping and more vaccines being administered.
He said: “Our healthcare teams are exhausted but getting their vaccination and the great signs of it reducing transmission is giving us all a second wind.
“We are winning, it’s just not over yet.”
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