Covid-19 vaccinations are poised to resume on a limited basis in the South after a frantic day reconfiguring clinics to meet Alert Level 4 requirements.
All vaccination across New Zealand halted yesterday after the Government’s swift shift from Alert Level 1 to 4 following a positive case of the Delta variant of the pandemic disease being found in Auckland.
Southern District Health Board staff at the mass vaccination centres in Dunedin and Invercargill spent yesterday reconfiguring their work spaces to meet Level 4 requirements.
All appointments yesterday and today were initially cancelled, and the main vaccination centres were planned to resume tomorrow.
However, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced yesterday afternoon that the vaccination programme would resume today, a statement the Otago Daily Times understands blindsided most, if not all, district health boards.
SDHB vaccination rollout incident controller Hamish Brown said last night that most southern vaccination sites would remain closed today.
‘‘However, some pharmacies and practices have indicated they are able to deliver their vaccines safely under Level 4 restrictions tomorrow [today],’’ he said.
‘‘We will contact those people who can be accommodated by these providers directly.’’
The mass vaccination sites in Dunedin and Invercargill would reopen tomorrow, he said.
Community vaccination clinics were also scrambling to make sure they complied with the new precautions.
Andrew Hou, of Roslyn Pharmacy, in Dunedin, said to make his clinic meet the new rules vaccination administration had been moved outside, and room for the mandatory 20-minute observation period post-injection had had to be altered.
‘‘It was quite a nice space there but we have had to rearrange it,’’ he said.
‘‘We are now waiting for guidance from the Ministry of Health about what level of PPE vaccinators will have to wear and what the guidelines are for patients, but we’re hoping we might be able to get under way again shortly.’’
Mr Hou believed the pharmacy would not have to slow down its vaccination programme.
‘‘We think that we should be all right to keep going at the pace we were, and we just really hope that everyone embraces the vaccination programme.’’
Ministry of Health data released yesterday showed 179,906 vaccinations had been dispensed in the South so far: the number was not broken down by first and second jabs.
Although that figure remains stubbornly well below the ministry’s planned number of vaccinations in the DHB region by this time, it is still the fifth-highest among the 20 DHBs.
The SDHB plan had been for 206,744 vaccinations to have been dispensed by last Sunday, but it fell 26,838 short of that.
Last week director-general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said he was pleased with the volume of injections the SDHB had delivered so far, and that its original plan had been ambitious, compared with other DHBs.
