UAE GIVES RECORD NUMBER OF VACCINES IN BID TO BEAT VIRUS
▶ Medics administer 118,928 doses in single day to take total to nearly 1.4 million, as UK records highest number of cases
The UAE administered its largest number of Covid-19 vaccine doses in a single day as authorities increased efforts to immunise half the population by the end of March.
Officials said yesterday that 118,928 doses of the two vaccines available in the Emirates, the Sinopharm and PfizerBioNTech shots, were administered in the previous 24 hours.
Since the nationwide vaccination drive began last month, 1,394,580 doses have been given to the public.
A person is considered to be protected against Covid-19 after they receive two doses of a vaccine.
On Tuesday, the UAE said more than 250,000 people had already received two vaccine doses.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Hamad Al Sharqi, Crown Prince of Fujairah, yesterday became the latest UAE leader to receive his first dose of vaccine. He thanked medical staff for their dedication to protecting public health.
Meanwhile, education chiefs in Abu Dhabi said private school pupils would return to classrooms on Sunday.
The Department of Education and Knowledge, the emirate’s private education regulator, told The National that inperson lessons would resume after schools adopted distance learning for the first two weeks of the new term.
All pupils, including those with chronic health conditions, were previously told they could return to schools from January 3.
This was also meant to include Years 7 to 9, who have been studying remotely since March.
This week, the Ministry of Education announced a plan for the safe return of public school pupils to classrooms across the country. It said some children would resume in-person classes from Sunday after two weeks of distance learning.
Pupils in Grades 9 to 12, known as Cycle 3, will return to classrooms next week but schools will have their capacity limits capped at 50 per cent to prevent crowding and ensure physical distancing.
The country’s vaccination push came as a high of 3,362 new infections were recorded yesterday.
Inoculation programmes are also under way around the world and India will begin the biggest on Saturday, with the aim of vaccinating 300 million people in the next six months. Ten million medics will be first, followed by 20 million other frontline workers.
Jordan began inoculating citizens yesterday with the aim of vaccinating a fifth of the country’s 10 million people. Officials said government hospitals in the northern provinces of Irbid and Mafraq began the first vaccinations in the morning.
Meanwhile, the UK recorded its highest daily death toll yesterday with 1,564 fatalities.
Ireland has reported the world’s highest infection rate despite being praised for its success in responding to previous waves of the virus.
There were 1,288 confirmed new cases for every million people in Ireland on Monday, according to data compiled by the University of Oxford.
As Britain heads towards its highest death toll since the Second World War, a scientist suggested that the new strain of coronavirus means the number of inoculations required for the country to achieve herd immunity has risen by a third.
Prof Graeme Ackland, a leading pandemic statistician at the University of Edinburgh, told The National that Britain’s total fatalities could increase from the latest tally of about 83,000 to more than 140,000 before the pandemic ends.
Frontline hospital workers have spoken about being in a wartime situation, where they have to make life-and-death choices over who should be given intensive care beds. Health chiefs are considering discharging patients early to hotels or their own homes to free up hospital beds.
The UK government hopes to create 24-hour vaccination centres to speed up the country’s inoculation campaign.
But the number needed to achieve herd immunity has increased from about 40 per cent of the population to 66 per cent with the appearance of the mutant strain, said Prof Ackland. Herd immunity is achieved when the virus can no longer spread among the population, through vaccination or people having already been infected.
Prof Ackland said that with the mutant strain infecting at least 50 per cent more people, by his calculation this meant 66 per cent of the population needed to be vaccinated to stop it transmitting.
That is a lower percentage than for measles (95 per cent) and polio (80 per cent).
The Oxford-educated physicist and engineer estimates that herd immunity will not be achieved until the population of about 67 million has been given two vaccinations, possibly not until spring next year.
But he said the most vulnerable of the population, the elderly and frontline workers, would be vaccinated “just in time”, before the onset of winter this year.
“What will happen on the timescale of six or seven months is that we’ll get to some herd immunity,” he said.
“We’ll get there because some people will be vaccinated and other people will have had the disease.”
Prof Ackland gave a warning about the “big unknown”, a reference to how effective the shots will be and whether vaccinated people can still spread Covid-19.
He said the death toll could exceed 140,000 in Britain, below the government estimate of 200,000 if there had been no vaccine.
The Office for National Statistics released figures that showed Covid-19 accounted for a third of all deaths in Britain in the first week of this month. Data from Public Health England also showed an exponential rise in cases throughout the country in the same week.
But one glimmer of hope in the past week has been news that Covid-19 testing has increased by about 33 per cent, but positive tests are only up by 5.5 per cent.
“We’re doing many more tests but we’re not getting as many positive results, which means that fewer people are potentially being affected,” said Dr Ilan Kelman, professor of disasters and health at University College London.
“But everything else is absolutely awful, with deaths over seven days up 50 per cent, which is absolutely devastating.
“We’re basically seeing two fully loaded passenger jet crashes a day. We are looking at this level of deaths, or worse, for very likely at least the next four weeks.”
Yesterday, 1,564 more deaths were recorded, the highest daily total, surpassing the 1,325 fatalities recorded last Friday.
Dr Kelman said unnecessary cancer deaths could be in the thousands, as people go without the necessary treatment.
“It’s a grim period in Britain’s history,” he said.
Healthcare workers said they had to choose who to put into intensive care, with limited beds available.
“You have to make tough, objective decisions on who’s going to do well and who’s not going to, and you just have to make the latter comfortable,” a senior NHS medic said.
“This is our Second World War and we are dealing with casualties on a wartime scale.
“I’d say we have another six weeks of seeing it get bad in terms of body count.”
There are concerns that Europe could be weeks away from a similar surge in fatalities.
“You would hope that the Europeans will look across at what’s happening here and figure out that it’s coming their way,” said Prof Ackland.