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More than 100,000 Covid-19 vaccine jabs have been issued in Northern Ireland so far, its Minister of Health has said.
At a press conference on Wednesday evening, Robin Swann said that up to Tuesday evening 109,259 doses of the Covid-19 vaccines had been administered.
Mr Swann also said that a new rapid Covid-19 test is being rolled out to hospitals in the coming weeks that would deliver “results inside 12 minutes”. This would allow doctors and nurses to “very quickly identify patients who do not have Covid-19” and would assist decision-making on what form of care to provide, he added.
The Department of Health hopes to have the vaccination programme completed by the early summer with the only possible “limiting factor”, according to Mr Swann, the availability of the vaccines.
The Minister, the chief medical officer Dr Michael McBride and the chief scientific officer Prof Ian Young however again warned against any public complacency, urging people to stay at home, notwithstanding the progress on the vaccine programme.
The department reported 19 more coronavirus-related deaths in its daily afternoon bulletin on Wednesday taking the total number of fatalities past the 1,500 mark to 1,517. The department also recorded 1,145 new cases of coronavirus.
There were 110 deaths in the past week compared with 78 in the previous seven days.
The pressure on hospitals continues to increase with bed occupancy at 99 per cent and the number of patients receiving coronavirus treatment now at 869, an increase of 84 on the previous day’s figures.
There are 56 Covid-19 patients in intensive care with 40 on ventilators.
Mr Swann replied “yes” when asked if he prayed at night that the health service would come through the current pressures.
“The scale and severity of the impact that Covid-19 is actually having on our system is like nothing we’ve seen in living memory,” he said.
Dr McBride said on Tuesday that restrictions on society would be required for a “considerable number of months”. Northern Ireland is in a six-week lockdown that is due to end on February 6th.
“I’m not certain that we will be emerging from lockdown in February. I think that would be optimistic in the extreme. We have a long, long way to go with this virus,” he said.
School transfer tests
Meanwhile, transfer tests for pupils moving from primary to second-level grammar schools will not be held in Northern Ireland this year.
Last week, the Post Primary Transfer Consortium, whose tests mainly apply to Catholic schools, announced it was not running the exams this year due to Covid-19.
The Association for Quality Education, whose tests apply to state or mainly Protestant schools, however said it would stage a single transfer exam on February 27th, public health conditions allowing.
Subsequently, a number of the 34 schools that operate the association’s tests said they would not run the exams.
On Wednesday evening, the association announced that it was cancelling the exams for this year “due to the ongoing uncertainty about the potential for an extended period of lockdown”.
DUP Minister of Education Peter Weir said the decision was disappointing. “It is clear that public health and the wider Covid-19 situation has prevented the transfer test taking place this year,” he said.
Mr Weir said that in the absence of tests schools’ boards of governors should prepare contingency plans to deal with pupils transferring to grammar schools.