26,500 care workers given second dose of Covid-19 vaccine

Hospitals gave a total of 26,500 acute care workers their second dose of the coronavirus vaccine by Monday evening. These healthcare workers are now fully inoculated against Covid-19, the national acute care network LNAZ announced, NU.nl reports.

Over 40 thousand acute care workers received the first injection, which means that some 14 thousand still have to get the second dose. This involves employees in intensive care, emergency rooms, ambulances, and coronavirus departments at hospitals. 

Hospitals also administered first doses to 7 thousand general practitioners and GPs' employees. More vaccines will become available for this group this week and another 8 thousand GPs will get their first shot, LNAZ said.

LNAZ decided to release its vaccination figures to the media following some confusion on the government's coronavirus dashboard. A new method used by the government to calculate the estimated number of vaccines administered resulted in this figure jumping from 226 thousand to 346 thousand between Saturday and Sunday. Reports from hospitals and long-term care facilities sometimes arrived late and this new method took that delay into account, the government said.

But criticism from the LNAZ prompted the Ministry of Public Health to check its figures again, which revealed that "there was a double count of 17,550 injections". The figure was therefore corrected to an estimated 343,881 coronavirus vaccines administered on Monday evening.

The estimation is based on the numbers of vaccines delivered to injections sites by the RIVM, the Ministry explained in a statement. The delivered vaccines are administered on the day of delivery and for three days thereafter. The Ministry assumes that this is done in equal parts, so 25 percent per day. The Ministry takes into account 5 percent of wastage and assumes 6 doses come per vial of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and 10 doses per vial of the Moderna vaccine.