United Kingdom is vaccinating 200,000 people daily against the ravaging COVID-19 pandemic.
The country is on course to reach 2 million a week, the rate needed to cover the most vulnerable people and hit the government’s target by the middle of February, Matt Hancock said.
Britain’s health secretary warned of the unprecedented challenges facing the National Health Service as he urged people to stay at home during the latest lockdown.
Hancock said “It is a very, very serious situation in the NHS,” Matt Hancock told Sky News on Sunday. “The pressure on the NHS is very bad so we need to bring the case rate down.
“Just because the vaccines are coming we can’t let up because the pressure on the NHS is right here, right now.”
Official figures show at least 1,296,432 people in the UK have received at least one dose of the Coronavirus vaccine to date.
“At the moment, we’re running over 200,000 people being vaccinated every day,” Mr 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.”
The health chief said he backed tougher penalties for people caught flouting lockdown rules, after two women were each fined £200 by police after they drove eight kilometres to go for a walk at Foremark Reservoir in Derbyshire.
“The challenge here is that every flex can be fatal. You might look at the rules and think to yourself ‘well, it doesn’t matter too much if I just do this or I just do that’,” Mr Hancock said.
‘These rules are not there as boundaries to be pushed, they are the limit of what people should be doing.”
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson set a target of delivering about 15 million vaccinations by mid-February as his government races to get ahead of variants of the virus that have triggered a surge of infections.
The UK reported 59,937 new Covid-19 cases on Saturday and it has the worst death toll in Western Europe – more than 80,000.
