Covid: Hampden and EICC to become mass vaccination centres
- Published
Hampden Park will become a mass vaccination centre
Mass vaccination centres are to open at Hampden Park stadium in Glasgow and the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, Nicola Sturgeon has confirmed.
The first minister's announcement came as she told MSPs the Omicron variant would become the dominant strain of Covid-19 in Scotland by Friday.
Opposition parties have been pushing for mass vaccination centres to reopen as the new variant cases increased.
Ministers want more than 60,000 people to be vaccinated per day.
However, Ms Sturgeon said that to do this the flu vaccination programme must be de-prioritised.
Scottish Conservatives leader Douglas Ross has been asking for mass vaccination centres to reopen for a number of weeks.
During First Minister's Questions, Ms Sturgeon listed a number of extra vaccination facilities, including Hampden Park, the EICC, Ingliston and Ravenscraig. She said more centres were also being prepared.
The Hydro and the SEC were previously used as mass vaccination centres in Glasgow - after the SEC had been transformed into NHS Louisa Jordan - however, both venues have since returned to hosting concerts and events.
The NHS Louisa Jordan at the Scottish Event Campus was built early in the pandemic amid fears the NHS could be overwhelmed
At the earlier Covid-19 recovery committee, Deputy First Minister John Swinney said that on Tuesday 77,000 vaccinations were carried out - 18,000 of which were flu vaccinations.
"We have got to very high levels of flu vaccinations in the most vulnerable categories," he said. "We believe its a clinically safe risk to take to de-prioritise the remainder of the flu vaccination programme. That frees up capacity within the Covid vaccination programme."
Mr Swinney said he could not rule out the need to introduce stricter rules over the Christmas holiday period.
Derek Grieves, head of the Scottish government's operational vaccines division, told the committee there would be an extra 100 military personnel deployed to help with vaccinations.
He confirmed the opening of the extra facilities and said vaccine centres were extending their opening hours.
The EICC was previously used as a vaccination centre
National clinical director, Prof Jason Leitch, told the committee the timing of the latest variant was "horrid".
He said: "We're at the foothill of the wave just now, which is why we're asking people to help us control that wave as much as they can. "That would suggest peak in January, that would suggest peak hospitalisations two weeks after that peak."
The number of hospital cases which will lead to intensive care and death are not certain, he said, but he added that early evidence from Scandinavia was "not encouraging".
At First Minister's Questions, Ms Sturgeon highlighted the fact that someone vaccinated today would not have immune protection for several days.
She said that as well as speeding up the vaccination programme, people must act now to slow the spread of the virus.
She added that Omicron was "running faster than even the fastest rollout of vaccines".
"Omicron is spreading exponentially fast, much faster than anything experienced so far in the pandemic. I am profoundly concerned by the scale and immediacy of the challenge it poses," she said.
The first minister said that even if Omicron's impact on individual health was milder than other variants, "many will still become severely ill and die, and the sheer number of people infected will present a massive challenge".
She said 45% of the 5,951 Covid cases reported on Thursday were suspected to be the new variant.
- Published16 December 2021
- Published14 December 2021
