By Michelle Devane, PA
Ireland will reach the milestone of one million vaccine doses administered some time next week, the head of the health service has predicted.
Paul Reid said more than 900,000 doses will have been completed by the end of the weekend.
It comes as a further 511 new cases of the virus were confirmed in the country on Saturday.
The Department of Health was also notified of two further deaths linked to the virus.
Yesterday, Good Friday, we had one of our highest days so far for the vaccine administration. We'll have well over 900,000 completed by this weekend. During next week, we'll have administered over 1M doses. April & May will see the programme scale up further again @HSELive
— Paul Reid (@paulreiddublin) April 3, 2021
As of 8am, there were 242 people with coronavirus in hospital — and as of 11am there were 65 people in ICU with the disease.
Mr Reid said: “Good Friday, we had one of our highest days so far for the vaccine administration.
“We’ll have well over 900,000 completed by this weekend.
“During next week, we’ll have administered over one million doses. April & May will see the programme scale up further again.”
Right now, people most at risk are being offered the COVID-19 vaccine first. COVID-19 vaccination will be offered to the next groups as soon as possible. For updates on the vaccines roll-out visit:
➡️https://t.co/Dm15BDbZ8H#CovidVaccines #HoldFirm pic.twitter.com/7N6g796nyH— HSE Ireland (@HSELive) April 3, 2021
As of March 31, the HSE figures show a total of 865,460 vaccine doses have been administered. These include 619,003 first doses and 246,457 second doses.
