Opportunity to win the Corona vaccine lottery for a citizen who does not live near the Corona vaccine injection site

People in England are currently facing a postcode lottery for coronavirus jabs as a quarter of people live in an area with no vaccination centre, new figures reportedly show.

It comes as the NHS is ramping up its immunisation programme following the approval of the Oxford AstraZeneca jab with the first doses being given on Monday.

The approval came almost a month after rollout of the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech began, with more than one million people having now received their first dose.

This works out at around 300,000 vaccines per week but two million Brits need to get the jab every week for life to return to some form of normality by Easter, experts have said.

But NHS England data analysed by the Sunday Times shows that 13million of England's 56million population live in areas with no vaccine centre.

697 vaccine centres have so far been set up in hospitals, GP practices and community buildings across England.

But a quarter of the population do not currently live near one.

The newspaper reports that Bedford, Newark and Braintree currently have no centres while Nottingham only has one at the main hospital.

London has eight sites for every one million despite the huge spike in infections.

Approximately 1.7million people face a 20 mile journey to get their jab while around eight million will have a ten mile round trip meaning those without private transport or the elderly may struggle to make their appointments.

Meanwhile, around 530,000 doses of the vaccine will be available for rollout across the UK from Monday, with vulnerable groups already identified as the priority for immunisation.

The jab will be administered at a small number of hospitals for the first few days for surveillance purposes, before the bulk of supplies are sent to hundreds of GP-led services to be rolled out, according to NHS England.

It comes as figures  showed a record-high 57,725 lab-confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK as of 9am on Saturday, with another 445 deaths within 28 days of a positive test.

It brings the official death toll to 74,570.

Separate figures published by the UK's statistics agencies for deaths where Covid-19 has been mentioned on the death certificate, together with additional data on deaths that have occurred in recent days, show there have now been 90,000 deaths involving Covid-19 in the UK.

This was the fifth day in a row daily cases have been above 50,000, with the previous high of 55,892 cases reported on New Year's Eve - the highest since mass testing began in late May.

It brings the total number of cases in the UK to 2,599,789.Follow the Official Rokna NEWS Telegram Channel For More and fresh NEWS.

Mirror