Coronavirus: Hong Kong to target elderly with one-stop jabs service, ‘deep-community’ approach as vaccination drive stalls
- Patrick Nip, who is in charge of Hong Kong’s inoculation drive, says daily vaccine uptake has fallen to 12,000 and more proactive approach is needed
- More than 20,000 people will need to get their first dose of vaccine each day for the next three weeks if the city is to reach threshold for herd immunity
Civil service chief Patrick Nip Tak-kuen, who is in charge of Hong Kong’s inoculation drive, said the daily vaccine uptake had fallen to 12,000 and a more proactive approach was needed.
He warned the city would fall short of its target of having 70 per cent – the threshold for achieving herd immunity – of its population immunised with a first jab, unless more than 20,000 people received their first dose each day for the next three weeks.
“The inoculation drive has hit a bottleneck. To get more people vaccinated, we have to adopt a more proactive, more agile, and more convenient approach,” Nip told a press conference.
“The 70 per cent vaccination rate is our target, but it’s not the final one … after that we need to have everyone suitable for vaccination getting the jab. We hope that by the end of the year, most of the eligible population will get vaccinated.”
As of Thursday, 4.3 million people had received their first Covid-19 jab, accounting for 63.8 per cent of the eligible population. But uptake has mainly been concentrated on those aged between 20 and 59, with more than 70 per cent vaccinated. That number drops for people aged 60 to 69, with only 56 per cent having had their first jab, and falls even further for those in their seventies and eighties, at 37 and 12 per cent respectively.
