As a data point, I had my second AZ jab today at a GP led clinic. I went online to cancel the pre-arranged online booking for my second jab. Warned on screen that cancelling could be a risk as appointments were scarce, or words to that effect. For research I tried to rebook (the system obviously hasn’t yet recorded today’s jab). It said I am eligible to book an appointment from 11 April onwards, that will be exactly 11 weeks since my first jab. I tried various postcodes, No appointments available from a post code in central London, nor in Hertfordshire, nor in Luton!

Thanks for the sleuthing on that. I think we can't probably say that the infection numbers are about 25% higher as a result of Lateral Flow being widely used now, since some of those positives would have been found via PCR. But if we are making comparisons with February I think we could knock a quarter off current figures. If the total test numbers go below 1 million a day the that will be the impact of secondary school students and teaching staff not sending their tests in during the Easter break.

A little data:

Cases 3,862 (5,312 last Sunday)
Deaths 19 (33 last Sunday)

Healthcare data has not been updated so far today. The drop in cases today means the 7 day rolling average is back below the previous week by 1.7%.

The weekly average deaths is now down to 62. We may see single figures for daily deaths in the next week or so.

Well done all of you! The measure for success here seems to be can *I* get a jab, but it seems like the focus there is on the higher prize.

Some of our healthy friends in their late 30s got there’s last week at a mass vaccination site in London that was apparently quite underutilized. I’m not quite sure how the play by play went but basically the bottom line was the staff was aggressively trying to get anyone to come into take a jab given how many people they had sitting around. It wasn’t end of day so not even sure it was an expiring vaccine issue - I think more just capacity and the mantra of vaccinate someone rather than no one on any given day even if the order isn’t followed.

I think I read that the Excel centre was doing this too if any young FTs live near enough.

A number of things can explain this. The underlying context is that HMG is still trying to get us to focus on 50 years plus, but we are probably running out of the low hanging fruit. Of course we can invite more people in their 40s in, but the risk is that some 50s won't get nagged to come in by dint of getting the easy wins in. With the old dears you don't need to nag, a trip to the vaccination centre is way more exciting than most episodes of Cash in the Attic. There is no shortage of vaccinators, volunteers and clinical people. Sometimes we do run out of car parking spots, but that is often self resolving, people drive off and come back later.
1) When either Pfizer and AZ have been brought to room temperature, and Pfizer has had the saline added, then it's 6 hours use-it or lose-it. You can't put it back in the fridge for tomorrow. So the vaccines are brought out of the fridge bit by bit as the day progresses. Getting mid afternoon to end of day numbers is very tricky, hence we end up phoning up schools and police stations to get teachers and cops in to balance the available numbers out. So those German reports of not wasting any vaccines seem impossible to me. Hence at some point any passing Japanese tourist will do.
2) Some AZ batches were made before approval and I did have a run of them yesterday with a batch expiry date of 31 March. Now the chances are they would be fine on 1 April, but under protocols they have to go into the bin.
3) DNA = Did Not Attend.In good weather and with an older cohort you get very little DNA, with vile weather and youngsters, well you can guess. Not everyone in my area has a car, by any means.
4) Each vial has between 8 and 10 doses in it, you can normally get one extra dose, but not every time. It has to be exactly 0.3ml (Pfizer) or 0.5 ml (AZ) in the syringe so again balancing numbers gets tricky.
5) Pfizer has a heap of other problems, to do with shipping size, maximum fridge time and that you can't make too many trips with it.

Every day is a magic mystery tour for the vaccinators as to what it's going to be. We all hate, hate, hate doing nothing, and we sometimes have an hour or two which are very quiet, but it's also true we need those 50+ to turn up, as of last Sunday we only had 65% cover of those 50-54 and 80% cover for 55-59 years old.

So, purely out of curiousity, if you had a quiet hour or two and someone aged thirty-something turned up and said "gizza jab" (with apologies to Yosser Hughes :) ) would you jab them?

Yes. Even Scousers will do.

The longer answer is that the centre management can probably see us looking bored and doing aerobics at the back, so a blind eye may be turned. If they are 50 plus then we will jab them even if they don't have an NHS Number, and that age group we are not allowed to turn people away, full stop. We don't like turning people away in any event.

I went to 3 of the mass vaccination sites in Birmingham this week at the end of the day (times advised by the security guards) and was given a firm no by all of them. The most friendly centre advised that they’re not allowed to give them to people
off the street, they call people with appointments and bring them forwards.

My local GP practice is also vaccinating and they told me to keep trying at the end of each day they’re operating, but they’re doing 2nd jabs, so lots of quite old people and they’re all turning up.

Don’t want to be a nuisance, so going to give it a rest for a few weeks.

That's interesting, because I have tried the "I am a teacher, you close in an hour, can I have a jab please" trick in Scotland and was told to f off twice that I tried and made it clear that it cannot and will not happen so don't bother trying again.

Here is the current Scottish coverage by age, fyi. Seems a bit worse than what England has managed so far in the 50-60 categories? The percentages for 60+ are amazing, though, and higher than rUK I think.
https://cimg4.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...3c1d401cab.png

Maybe the approach, 'do you have any spare jabs that need to be used today? would love to use the spare ones if possible' would be better. Saying you are a teacher sounds condescending. Also try it with other vaccination centers, maybe they have more spare doses going.

I think its the right approach overall, in the end of the day people under 50 with no major underlying health conditions are not at much risk from getting seriously ill from the disease, even more so in the low prevalence of the disease in the UK.

I'd rather they focus on 2nd doses on vulnerable.

I suspect the GP led centres and pharmacies will be more flexible at the end of the day. I can see how the national vaccination centres would play it by the rule book, but that doesn't explain ExCel, reported above.