Phase 2 of Covid-19 vaccinations in SA opened last week. So far, only 1.6 million out of 5.4 million over-60s have registered for the shot.
THE LEVEL of registration for people aged 60 and above has been disappointingly low, says Business for South Africa (B4SA).
Phase 2 of Covid-19 vaccinations in SA opened last week. So far, 1.6 million out of 5.4 million over-60s have registered for the shot.
B4SA steering committee chairperson Martin Kingston said there were plans to step up the programme.
“It started off with small numbers, but there are plans to scale up capacity significantly in the coming days and weeks. We are running about 130,000 registrations per day at the moment, and we intend to ramp up ’aggressively’ over the next month and are aiming to reach 192,500 vaccinations a day by the end of May,” Kingston said.
“One of our key drives is getting as many people to register. We believe in the coming days we will be opening registration and getting more vaccination sites on board to get more jabs in arms quicker.”
Head of Discovery’s Covid-19 task team Ronald Whelan said there was reasonable capacity beginning to build in the public and private sector. Apart from getting more people to register, the focus would be placed on bolstering the vaccination capacity.
“We have more supply scheduled for the country and that supply is more than sufficient to vaccinate the entire adult population,” he said
Whelan said medical schemes had not been able to procure vaccines outside government channels.
Three million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine are expected in the country by the end of June, with the first two million doses to arrive by the end of May.
