How many people have been vaccinated in New Zealand? How does that stack up with the rest of the world? Newsroom presents a weekly dashboard of everything you need to know about our country’s vaccine rollout.
In the past week, New Zealand administered an additional 130,244 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine – the highest level of any week so far. This is currently the only Covid-19 vaccine authorised for use here.
Alongside 67,215 more people getting their first dose of the vaccine, an additional 63,029 New Zealanders are now fully vaccinated.
That brings the total number of people with at least partial protection to 705,062 and the total number of fully vaccinated people to just under 445,000. The Pfizer vaccine is proven to provide a high level of immunity after just one dose and is up to 97 percent effective against symptomatic Covid-19 from two weeks after the second shot is administered.
Ultimately, the Government hopes to vaccinate as many as four million New Zealanders. Last week, Medsafe approved the vaccine for use in children aged 12 to 15. However, Cabinet still has to formally decide whether to use the vaccine in this group before they become eligible (with parental permission).
So far, just over 16,000 doses have been administered to teenagers (all aged 16 and up) in New Zealand. Until recently, people aged 50 to 59 had received more vaccines than any other age group, but those in their 60s are now the leading category as Group 3 (which includes over 65s) vaccinations scale up, with those in their 70s in second place. In every age group, more women have been vaccinated than men.
The rollout hasn’t been proportionate across ethnic groups either. Even though Māori make up some 16 percent of the population, just 9.5 percent of the doses distributed so far have gone to Māori. Pasifika are also slightly underrepresented, while Europeans and Asian New Zealanders are overrepresented.
In a press release two weeks ago, Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield said the Ministry of Health had ordered District Health Boards (DHBs) to scale back their vaccination programmes if they are over-performing their plans, due to concerns over vaccine supplies. While a million more vaccines will arrive in July, stocks could run thin in the interim as we administer more doses than we import.
However, many DHBs have failed to corral their vaccinations. The above chart shows the progress of a handful of DHBs as well as the total for all DHBs, against their respective plans. Vaccinations have continued to rise in many of these regions and, for the country as a whole, DHBs are still exceeding their plans.
Overall, the country is now over-performing DHB plans by 7.64 percent, down very slightly from the week before. DHB over-performance isn’t evenly spread across the board, however. Some DHBs have done better – Nelson Marlborough and Whanganui, for example, have vaccinated more than half again as many people as they expected to. Others have struggled to meet their targets.
In the Wairarapa, less than 80 percent of those who were meant to be vaccinated by the end of last week had been. Northland was lagging previously, but the DHB has opened up vaccines to people over the age of 50 and seen a corresponding surge in participation. It is now vaccinating about 17 percent ahead of plan.
On a population basis, however, Wairarapa isn’t the worst performer. Less than 10 percent of those over the age of 14 covered by the Taranaki DHB have had even a single shot of vaccine.
Here, Nelson Marlborough is far out in the lead, with 23.76 percent of its eligible population having had at least one dose. This is the only DHB that has vaccinated more people than the world average. The next highest is West Coast, with 22.87 percent. Counties Manukau, also with over 22 percent, has the third most vaccinated population.
The beginning of May marked the first time our vaccine stocks dropped. As the rollout scales up, expect those stocks to fall further as we administer more doses than we import in any given week. From mid-July, however, large shipments of Pfizer vaccines will begin to arrive, refreshing the supplies. Three weeks ago, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins announced that 1 million doses of vaccine were expected to arrive in July, close to doubling our total received stocks.
And there’s no doubt that the rollout is scaling up. The below chart shows the number of doses administered each week.
Last week saw us administer a record-high number of doses. The below chart shows the degree to which the rollout is scaling up or down. A positive number means we administered more vaccines in that week than the previous one and a negative number means the inverse. If the number is close to zero, it means the rollout was flat over the past week.
There are now more than 8400 trained vaccinators, 3394 of whom have been active at some stage during the rollout.
