The Department of Health has said vaccination sites will be adequately staffed every day from August 1, which will speed up the rollout.
It may soon be easier to get vaccinated over the weekend as the Department of Health has said vaccination sites will be adequately staffed every day from August 1, which will speed up the rollout.
Deputy director-general of the Health Department, Dr Nicholas Crisp, said on Friday all provinces will increase their primary healthcare services and using all of their facilities and clinics to their full capacity.
“The idea is to use every single potential capacity of nursing and doctors to increase the vaccination tempo,” he said.
Data from the National Income Dynamics Study – Coronavirus Rapid Mobile (Nids-Cram) survey found that between May 17 May and July 5 this year, weekend vaccination rates were only 4% of weekday vaccination rates.
Authors of the study said there were “virtually no vaccinations on weekends”, and the lack of jabs over the weekend will be a challenge for the country to reach its rollout targets.
Acting Health Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane said meetings were held with the National Treasury this week where funding for the vaccination rollout was discussed.
“To this end, we will be starting our work to ensure the availability of human capital to vaccinate over weekends as well,” she said.
Additional staff and students from health science faculties will be making themselves available to their provincial departments to bolster the capacity of hospitals and clinics.
“The question of weekends has been a big issue from the beginning, and I think we’ve all been on record to say we didn’t have the capacity to vaccinate a lot over the weekend with staff,” said Crisp.
South Africa has vaccinated more than four million people who have received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, and the number of daily vaccinations is increasing.
On Thursday, there were over 191 000 people vaccinated, and the department of health is expecting to surpass 250 000 vaccinations per day by next week.
The department aims to vaccinate 67% of the population, or 40 million South Africans, before May 2022.
