Four new vaccination centres open in London as Covid rates fall
Four major new vaccination centres have opened in London today, as the capital ups its vaccine programme alongside a decline in coronavirus cases.
A large-scale vaccination centre at the Francis Crick Institute in central London will open its doors today for frontline healthcare staff, before welcoming the over-80s and at-risk individuals from tomorrow.
The centre will have capacity to vaccinate up to 1,000 people a day, seven days a week, and will be run by more than 300 volunteers from the Crick institute.
Another pop-up vaccination site will open at a former Ikea store in Westfield Stratford, while two further centres will open at the Hornsey Central Neighbourhood Health Centre in Crouch End and at the Hawks Road Health Clinic in Kingston.
The London sites are among a list of 32 new vaccine centres opening across the UK today, as the government ramps up plans to get the most at-risk populations immunised by mid-February.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted this morning: “The opening of 32 new large-scale vaccination centres this week is another step in our fight against Covid. When you are invited to get vaccinated, please do so. You’ll be protecting yourself and helping us defeat the virus.”
There are also seven mass vaccination centres across the UK, including the Nightingale Hospital in London’s Excel Centre which opened earlier this month.
More than 6.3m people across Britain have received their first dose of the vaccine so far, including three-quarters of all over-80s.
However, the latest vaccination figures showed London is still lagging behind other regions in the race.
Figures released yesterday from NHS England showed the capital has received just 641,577 doses of the Covid vaccine — almost half the number rolled out in the Midlands, which has so far given distributed 1,111,165 vaccine doses.
Health secretary Matt Hancock last week admitted the major hurdle in the UK’s vaccination programme was a “lumpy supply”, adding that more doses would be sent to areas that have achieved the least progress.
“We are sending more doses to the areas that have made the least progress so far, to make sure that by 15 February we get that offer to everybody equally, irrespective of where they live,” he said.
It comes as the latest official figures showed coronavirus rates continue to fall across the capital, with all but two of London’s 32 boroughs noticing a drop in daily cases of more than 20 per last week.
Hounslow and Ealing in west London now have the highest infection rates in London, after overtaking areas in east London that have long been the most-infected in the capital
Daily hospital admissions in London have dropped by a quarter over the past week, while the total number of beds taken up by Covid-19 patients fell 11 per cent.