Discovery CEO Adrian Gore says the group’s administered schemes were aiming to vaccinate 550,000 high-risk members within a few weeks of the Covid-19 vaccine being available.
In a letter to Discovery members, Gore said the company was making an unprecedented financial and human capital investment on its mass vaccination programme. It aimed to vaccinate 3-million adult beneficiaries “quickly and efficiently, with the capacity to inoculate 50,000 people a day”, he said.
Gore said SA was on the brink of securing sufficient vaccines to cover more than 37-million adults.
The national vaccination drive will be the biggest in SA’s history, and aims to inoculate 40-million adults, “two-thirds of the country’s population”, to reach herd immunity. It has yet to get under way as commercial stocks secured from vaccine manufacturers have yet to be delivered.
The coronavirus has infected more than 1.5-million people in the country and killed more than 52,000. More than 231,000 people have received the Covid-19 vaccine.
Health minister Zweli Mkhize’s advisers have warned that the country could see coronavirus infections begin to rise as soon as mid-April as increased travel, holidays and religious gatherings fuel transmission and drive a third wave.
Speculation has been rife that the government could implement stricter Covid-19 regulations ahead of the Easter period. Health minister Zweli Mkhize’s advisers have recommended the reintroduction of tighter restrictions on alcohol sales and public gatherings to try to avoid a devastating new Covid-19 wave that could see hospital admissions up to a quarter higher than the previous surge.
Mkhize, speaking to the SABC on Thursday, said discussions about “stricter precautions” ahead of the Easter long weekend were being finalised. He said the decision to move the country to a higher lockdown level was being discussed by government officials and will be based on recommendations from epidemiological experts.
The cabinet last week announced that its plans to vaccinate 40-million people by the end of the year has been delayed by the shortage of vaccines, and it now expects the process will take until February 2022.
The Covid-19 vaccine will be rolled out in three phases, with the current phase 1 being implemented over three months from February to April and targeting 1.5-million health-care workers across the country.
The cabinet said phase 2 would be implemented over six months, starting from May to October and is targeted at more than 13.3-million people including essential workers, vulnerable groups and workers in the mining, hospitality, media, and taxi sectors, among other industries.
Phase 3 will be implemented from November to February 2022 to cover about 22.6-million people, including those who were not vaccinated during phase 2.
Gore, in his letter, said Discovery had undertaken a considerable amount of actuarial and epidemiological modelling and that in an ideal scenario it would aim to vaccinate all high-risk groups by the end of June. This included people over the age of 60 and those with comorbidities.
“The cabinet plan aims to achieve this, including essential workers, by latest October 2021. We will push hard as a combined public and private sector distribution initiative to achieve this sooner; and given the skewness in allocation of doses towards the third and fourth quarter of the year, those at highest risk will be prioritised for vaccination by July,” he said.
Discovery has paid out R1.5bn in say linked to Covid-19 since the global pandemic took hold in March 2020, with two-thirds of total payouts coming in January alone as a second wave of infections towards the end of 2020 inflated death say.
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