All eligible care home residents jabbed: Patrick Nip

The minister in charge of Hong Kong’s Covid-19 vaccination drive says the authorities have met their target of giving the first dose of the Covid vaccine to all eligible elderly care home residents in Hong Kong.

Civil service chief Patrick Nip said they’d set a target for their vaccine outreach teams to visit all 1,100 residential care homes, and gave the first dose of the vaccine to all eligible residents by Friday.

Speaking to RTHK’s Covid Update programme on Friday morning, he said that target has been met, in part because in the past two weeks, the authorities increased the number of outreach vaccination teams from five to 16, and mobilised more than 700 healthcare staff to help.

“At present, our figures is that about 42,000 residents in our residential care homes have received the jabs,” he said, saying this amounts to 55 percent of residents in care homes.

He added this was only the first stage of the plan.

Nip explained that that because of the fifth wave of outbreak, about 40 percent of residential care home residents have been infected with Covid and could not received the jabs in this stage of the outreach drive.

He said the outreach vaccination teams will visit the same care homes again over the next four weeks to administer the second doses of the vaccine, and also to give out first doses to residents who recently recovered from Covid.