(REUTERS): The United Kingdom is currently vaccinating 200,00 people a day against the novel coronavirus and is on its way to hitting two million vaccinations a week, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said.
“At the moment we’re running over 200,000 people being vaccinated every day. We are trying to ramp up immunisation to two million a week to cover the most vulnerable by mid-February,” Matt Hancock told an international news channel.
With a highly transmissible new variant of the virus surging across Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has shuttered the economy and is rushing out vaccines in a bid to stem the spread of the pandemic.
In this regard, Hancock said, “We’ve now vaccinated around a third of the over-80s in this country, so we are making significant progress, but there’s still further expansion to go. This week we are opening mass vaccination centres.”
Britain has the world’s fifth-highest official death toll from COVID-19 at nearly 80,000, and the 1,325 deaths reported within 28 days of a positive test on Friday surpassed the previous daily record toll from last April.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan, from the opposition Labour Party, said hospital beds in the capital would run out within the next few weeks because the spread of the virus was out of control. “We are declaring a major incident because the threat this virus poses to our city is at crisis point,” he added.
The designation of “major incident” is usually reserved for attacks or grave accidents, notably those likely to involve “serious harm, damage, disruption or risk to human life or welfare, essential services, the environment or national security”.
