Around 2 million people in total have been vaccinated against coronavirus in the UK, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said Sunday. His words came on the same day England’s Chief Medical Officer warned the “situation has deteriorated further” since Monday, when the national alert level was raised to the highest level for the first time.
Speaking to Sky News on Sunday, Hancock said the health service administered more doses over the last seven days than in the whole of December. Exact figures will be published on Monday, but he said the country was “on course” to inoculate 200,000 people per day.
“We’ve now vaccinated around a third of the over-80s in this country,” he added, saying the “most vulnerable” will be vaccinated by the “middle of February.”
Health service faces breaking point: Hancock’s comments came as Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty described the rising numbers of cases, deaths, and hospital admissions as “the most dangerous situation anyone can remember” facing the National Health Service in some parts of the country.
Writing in The Sunday Times, Whitty points to the “new, more transmissible variant of this disease,” which “is spreading rapidly across the country and having tragic consequences.”
Both Hancock and Whitty stressed the importance of obeying lockdown restrictions.
Every offence can be fatal,” Hancock said, “these rules are not there as boundaries to be pushed; they are the minimum of what you should do.”
“As far as we can tell, the vast majority are obeying the rules,” he added.
All adults to be vaccinated by fall: Speaking to Andrew Marr on the BBC on Sunday, Hancock also said every adult will be offered a Covid-19 vaccine by the fall. This will be “according to need,” with the most vulnerable offered a vaccine first.
Stressing the number of doses on order, Hancock said: “We are going to have enough to be able offer a vaccine to everyone over the age of 18, and by the autumn. I really hope that everybody will take that up.”
Grim case count: The UK has become the first country in western Europe to report more than 3 million coronavirus cases, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, and some 81,000 people have died.
On Saturday, the UK recorded a further 59,937 Covid related cases, and 1,035 deaths.
An earlier version of this post misstated the period that vaccinations took place. To date, a total of around 2 million people have been inoculated in the UK.