We’ve hit 500,000 vaccine milestone

IRELAND reached the milestone of administering more than 500,000 Covid-19 vaccines yesterday, despite concerns the inoculation programme will struggle to meet its March target because of supply issues.

Taoiseach Micheál Martin welcomed the progress and insisted the Government and HSE were doing all they could to secure more vaccines.

Reaching the half-million milestone means around 8,000 people have been vaccinated every day since the roll-out of Covid-19 vaccines started in December. However, the Government had promised to vaccinate 1.1 million people by the end of March.

Supply issues and the current rate of progress means there are doubts that target will be reached. On average, more than 20,000 vaccines will have to be issued every day this month for it to be reached.

Mr Martin said he had been inspired by recent visits to vaccination centres where thousands of frontline healthcare workers were receiving the inoculation.

The milestone was reached as the Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC) confirmed it had been notified of another 14 deaths related to the virus yesterday. Four of these occurred in January. One was in February.

The HPSC said it had also been notified of an additional 539 cases of Covid-19, bringing last week’s weekly total to 3,747.

This is the lowest weekly total since the period before Christmas. There were 3,381 notified cases between December 14 and December 20.

While another 22 patients were hospitalised with the virus, the total number being treated in hospitals dropped yesterday.

There were 414 people in hospital last night with the virus, down by 12 compared with Friday.

Of these, 101 are being treated in ICU, the Department of Health said.