1m jabs a month coming to Ireland
» » HSE chief vows supply will meet demand » » 35,000 weekly vaccination target passed
THE HSE plans for a million Covid- 19 vaccines to arrive into Ireland every month, it emerged yesterday.
Its chief executive Paul Reid stressed it will “meet supply with deliver y ” and confirmed the country is set to exceed its target of 35,000 jabs administered this week.
He said: “We do foresee coming into of the deliveries arrived between Moderna, Astra Zeneca, probably a million a month arriving.
“That’s what we all want to see, that’s what we’re mobilising to do.
“Just to give... reassurance, this week alone, we planned to do over 35,000 vaccinations, we will exceed that by today, I ’m happy to say.
“We have accel e rat e d t h e most vulnerable groups, which are elderly people in nursing homes and they will be completed now over the next two weeks instead of the next three.”
The HSE chief also told RTE’S This Week Covid- 19 hospitali sations are expected to be “double” the number of during the f irst wave.
He st re s s e d t h e “r i s i ng trend” of admissions i s of “concern” – with 136 additional patients being treated during t he 24- hour period between
Saturday and Sunday. Mr Reid, left, added: “Early this week will likely be at double what we had in the peak last year which was 881 in the first phase of this.
“Our concern is the rising trend. The actions people take today
are what can really help us in the coming days and weeks. Our health system is under increasing strain. The best support we can all now give, is to avoid getting sick with Covid.”
HSE chief clinical of f icer Dr Colm Henry warned yesterday that projections for hospitalisations are “quite scary”.
He said given the lag between infection
and admission means what happens in the next two weeks has “already been determined.”
Dr Henry said there are currently 600 hospital beds out of action due to infection control measures and staff being out sick or not in work as they are deemed to be close contacts of a person with Covid- 19. He also said there were 800 absent nursing home staff at present.
When asked if doctors could be forced to make difficult choices over who to treat Dr Henry told RTE Radio: “I hope not. Despite all the difficulties we have in this country if we look back at that first surge and indeed the second surge we can see that all of the efforts made by the Irish people made a huge difference.
“We did not have to face the same scenes as Bergamo, Wuhan and London.
“We saw remarkable outcomes in our intensive care during that first surge.
“The mortality in our intensive care patients with Covid was 21% – half that of the UK. Simply because the pressures weren’t quite the same so we don’t want to see those scenes.”
Dr Henr y was t al ki ng as i t was announced another 6,888 cases were confirmed yesterday and eight more people died to bring the death toll to 2,344, while there have now been 147,613 infections.
Most were in Dublin which saw 2,088 new cases with 862 i n Cork, 469 i n Limerick, 405 in Wexford, 320 in Waterford and the remaining 2,744 cases were spread across all other counties.
Meanwhile there were 1,452 patients in Irish hospitals with Covid- 19 with 125 of those in intensive care.
The figure represents 100 additional hospitalisations in the past 24 hours.
A staggering 61,484 new cases have been confirmed in the last 14 days.
The number of admissions due to the virus has more than quadrupled in the past two weeks, as 321 people were in hospital with the virus on December 27.
IT is a very welcome and reassuring development that HSE chief Paul Reid expects one million Covid- 19 vaccines to arrive into Ireland every month.
The country is facing the most challenging period of thi s deadly pandemic and it i s fantastic that the 35,000 vaccinations target for last week was exceeded yesterday.
Mr Reid insisted they will meet supply and lets hope the rollout targets can continue.
We really need to have some hope to cling on to and the country’s leaders in health and politics to do everything they can to prevent the death toll spiralling further out of control.