More than 1.3 million people in the United Kingdom have been vaccinated against COVID-19, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said as he pledged to publish daily statistics on who is receiving shots in an effort to end England’s new lockdown.
Mr Johnson has set a target of vaccinating the elderly, including care home residents, the clinically vulnerable and frontline workers – or roughly more than 13 million people – by mid-February.
If all goes smoothly, he has said that England can consider easing lockdown restrictions from that time.
The UK recorded more than 60,000 new coronavirus cases in daily figures for the first time on Tuesday.
The number of new daily cases has been more than 50,000 for the last eight days.
On Tuesday it was also announced a further 830 people had died within 28 days of a positive test, up from 407 on Monday.
Although the number of cases is rising, the UK’s testing capacity has also increased since the peak of the first wave last year.
Mr Johnson said more than 1.3 million people had been vaccinated as of Tuesday afternoon, adding that nearly 1000 vaccination sites would be ready by the end of the week.
“I want to give you… the maximum possible transparency about this vaccine roll-out,” he said at a news conference, promising more detail on Thursday, with daily updates from next Monday.
The UK has been inoculating people with the vaccine developed by Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech for the past four weeks and on Monday also became the first country in the world to start deploying the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University.
Mr Johnson also said on Tuesday his government would soon demand COVID-19 tests for passengers arriving from overseas to stop the spread of the virus.
The move would mean following a policy used in many other countries.
“We will be bringing in measures to ensure that we test people coming into this country and prevent the virus from being re-admitted,” Mr Johnson said.
