Number of people receiving a Covid booster shot continues to fall

There was not a rush to get Covid-19 vaccine booster shots last week, even though people may soon lose their coronavirus access passes based on their vaccination status. The passes will expire when someone has not received a jab for 270 days, but the clock can be reset with a booster shot, or by recovering from a more recent coronavirus infection.

Just over 192,000 people got a booster shot during the last calendar week. That is the lowest number since November, when the booster campaign had yet to pick up steam. A week earlier, almost 233,000 booster shots were administered, and about a month ago a record number of almost 1.9 million received a shot during a seven-day period.

The conditions for the vaccination certificate in the CoronaCheck app were adjusted on Tuesday. The app presents a QR code that can be scanned at the entrance to bars, cafes, restaurants, theaters, and many other locations. If the last injection from the first vaccine series was more than nine months ago, the QR code will not be valid. In total, about 2.6 million people could lose their vaccination certificate in the coming months.

Thus far, a total of 8.6 million people have received a booster shot. Just over 60 percent of all adults have now received the extra jab. Almost 85 percent of all Dutch people aged 12 years of age or older were fully vaccinated after a first round of shots.

Additionally, just under 13,000 children between the ages of five and 11 without underlying medical conditions received their first vaccines shots last week. That pushed the total number of shots given to younger children up to about 65,000.

Children from the age of five have only been able to get vaccinated against Covid-19 for the past few weeks, in which case the GGD uses the Pfizer vaccine. No vaccines are approved for use in the Netherlands for children below the age of five years of age.

In total, 24,909,127 original series vaccine shots have been given in the Netherlands, a weekly increase of nearly 30,500. About 18,500 were a person’s first-ever Covid-19 jab, and the other 12,000 was a second dose from the initial series. Fewer than a hundred people received the one-shot Janssen vaccine last week.