Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 26) — The country should be inoculating over 350,000 persons daily to reach its COVID-19 vaccination target, a health expert said on Monday.
This number is more than seven times the nation’s current daily vaccination capacity, which stood at an average of 44,000 last week and 47,000 the week before, based on data from the Department of Health. Three weeks ago, only around 23,000 people were being vaccinated daily.
“The basis for the 350,000 is if we started (the vaccine rollout) March 1, and we hope to achieve 70% vaccination of the population after a year, let’s say February 28, 2022, that’s the rate that we should be doing it,” epidemiologist Dr. John Wong, who is also part of the national COVID-19 task force’s subgroup on data analytics, said in a Palace briefing.
But the government has set a target date earlier than February next year. It previously announced aiming to inoculate 70% of all Filipinos, or around 70 million people, by the end of 2021 in a bid to achieve herd immunity from the coronavirus.
Since it has also been nearly two months since the immunization drive began and the current figures are still far from the ideal, Wong later on said the 350,000 is now “certainly an underestimate.”
“The later that we’re able to hit that target or even higher [than 350,000], the bigger the target will become,” he added.
The government earlier eyed up to 1 million vaccine recipients weekly by April, but it hit a snag when the vaccine supply dwindled. Official data as of April 22 showed only 1.6 million vaccine doses have been administered to around 1.39 million individuals since the rollout began in March.
Around 4 million additional doses from different brands are expected to arrive next month, while some 7 to 8 million are seen to arrive in June. Vaccine czar Carlito Galvez, Jr. previously said they aim to ramp up weekly vaccination capacity to 3 to 5 million in June and July to keep up with the year-end goal.
