The HSE has said vaccine capacity will increase next week after hundreds were turned away from walk-in centres that had reached capacity yesterday.
It comes after Micheál Martin, the taoiseach, told the Dail on Tuesday that more than 215,000 appointments for booster shots were missed in the past two weeks. He said there did not appear to be the same urgency among the public to get the third dose compared with the first and second jab.
Pete Nugent, 60, received a text on Wednesday from the HSE to attend a walk-in clinic for his booster shot. Nugent, a musician, opted to go to the vaccine site nearest him at University College Dublin at 9am yesterday as it was open from 8am to 10am.
“I drove in and parked and walked to the building and then I saw the queue,” he told The Times. “I walked up to a guy that was about 250 metres from the entrance and asked him how long he had been waiting. He said he had been there since 7.30am, before the walk-in centre even opened. It was now about 9.10am.”
The centre reached capacity just as Nugent arrived and hundreds of people in the queue were turned away. “I got the text and I want to show up, I didn’t want to miss my appointment. But there wasn’t any point. The HSE is sending out these texts, they know how many people to expect, and then they are left in queues for hours or told to go home. It’s a joke.
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“I tried contacting the HSE to see if I could get a new text or what I should do now but I didn’t get much back. I think I will try to go to a pharmacy now. The walk-in sites don’t seem hopeful.”
The HSE confirmed yesterday that people are getting multiple booster vaccine appointments because of a glitch between the HSE’s vaccination database and the IT systems used by pharmacies and GPs.
The HSE said yesterday via live updates on Twitter that Croke Park reached capacity during its morning hours at 10.30am and at 1.50pm during its afternoon hours. Punchestown in Kildare reached capacity for its 60-69 year-old walk-in clinic and had an estimated wait time of three hours.
Damien McCallion, the HSE head of testing and tracing, said at a HSE briefing yesterday that the focus is to get the maximum number of people vaccinated. “We’re increasing the vaccination channel capacity across general practice, our vaccine centres and our pharmacies and we’re continuing to increase their activity week on week.”
McCallion added there have been “challenges” with appointment scheduling and that data from pharmacies are being uploaded immediately and GPs are updating information daily to prevent people receiving multiple appointments. Previously, there was a two-day lag between pharmacy and GP information reaching the HSE. It is understood that about 90,000 booster doses were administered last week. The HSE could not clarify yesterday what the total capacity of the vaccine system is, or what it will be increased to next week.
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Dr Colm Henry, chief clinical officer, added that work is under way to plan the rollout of the vaccine to five to 11-year-olds as the Department of Health confirmed deliveries for the children’s vaccine are expected to arrive next week. Henry said it will be difficult to transform the National Immunisation Advisory Committee’s recommendation into a plan that is simple and effective.
Paul Reid, HSE chief executive, said it will be challenging to identify children that should be prioritised for the vaccine. Reid added that dedicated centres will need to be organised for the cohort while not losing pace of the overall vaccine rollout.
It comes as six cases of the Omicron variant have now been detected in Ireland, according to Gisaid, an international tracking service. The first case of the variant was identified on December 1.
Henry said that there is capacity for genome sequencing of 1,500 cases to detect variants and that capacity may increase to 2,000 cases a week. “There is a marker for this but it’s not absolutely specific — that’s the S gene dropout — and at this point in time quite a number of S gene dropouts are being investigated in sequence. I have no doubt many of those will be confirmed as Omicron cases.”
Reid added it is “only a matter of time” before there are a significant number of Omicron cases in Ireland. “We expect it to become more dominant. The time frame is unknown.”
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The Department of Health confirmed 4,022 new Covid-19 cases yesterday. The number of people receiving treatment for the virus in hospital is at 530, down 13 from Wednesday. Of these, there are 115 patients in intensive care, down three from the day previous.
