Big Vaccination Push Falls Short
Denmark’s ‘big experiment’ shows plenty of room for improvement
The numbers are in for Friday’s COVID vaccination storskalaforsøget, or big experiment, and there is good and bad news.
On Friday vaccination centers across the country went all out to see if administering 100,000 vaccinations a day was feasible. This is the number Statsminister Mette Frederiksen has said is possible if Denmark had reliable supply of vaccine doses needed to do it. It would also be key to reaching the government’s goal of getting everyone vaccinated by no later than June 27th.
According to the Staten Serum Institut vaccinations dashboard, and confirmed on Twitter by Denmark’s Health Minister Magnus Heunicke, there were 36,564 first doses and 990 second vaccination doses administered on Friday, for a total of 37,554 inoculations.
The bad news is that the effort fell 62,446 vaccinations short of reaching the desired goal of 100,000.
The good news is that last week, in the four days leading up to Friday, there were around 15,000 total vaccinations per day. So the big experiment more than doubled daily vaccination numbers.
Another part of the silver lining is that reports from a number of the five health regions said there were virtually no queues and the vaccination rhythm as people cycled through seemed to work pretty well.
To provide some context to the numbers, it would take roughly a year and a half, going forward, to vaccinate everyone in Denmark at a rate of 15,000 vaccinations per day. 36,000 vaccinations a day gets it done by around October or November.
If Denmark can get the vaccine supply rolling and torque the system to get to a 100,000 daily vaccinations quickly, June 27th is doable.
Denmark will also put vaccination contracts out to tender with the hopes of partnering with the private sector to drive daily vaccinations up to 400,000 per day.
As of yesterday’s update there have been 412,358 1st dose (7.1% of pop) and 182,074 2nd dose vaccinations (3.1% of pop) administered to date.
