Stockholm to offer all adults vaccine by second week in May: coordinator

The coordinator, Magnus Thyberg, said that the region hoped to start vaccinating those between the ages of 65 and 69 in “just over a week”, those between the ages of 60 and 65 in the week starting April 26th (Week 17), and those between 18-59 in the week starting May 10th (Week 19), with several large scale vaccination centres set to open in May to handle the increased number of inoculations.

“We can and we will start to vaccinate as soon as we have sufficient doses of the vaccine,” he said. “We will now vaccinate as quickly, as safely and as efficiently as possible.”

But he warned that this timeline will only be met if the Public Health Agency of Sweden begins to share vaccines between regions based on the size of the population of 18-59 year-olds, a shift it has said it intends to make later this month.

“As it is now, our share of the vaccine is based on how many people we have over the age of 65, which means we receive significantly fewer doses in relation to our population,” Thyberg said.

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Switching to measuring doses by the population of 18 to 59-year-olds would increase Stockholm’s share from 18 percent of doses delivered to Sweden to 24 percent.

“That’s an extremely big difference and we need to see that shift in deliveries soon,” he said.

On Friday, the region announced that it was opening five new vaccination centres, to help with phase 2, when those born before 1951 will be vaccinated. The centres will be in Haninge, Johanneshov, Norrtälje, Kista and Odenplan and will be operated by different private suppliers. 

By April 4th, Stockholm had succeeded in using just 309,617 doses of the 419,700 that have been delivered to it, putting it among the worst performers among the regions, something Aida Hadzialic from the Social Democrats has blamed on how many of the region’s primary care centres are run by private companies.

“Over a third of healthcare in Stockholm region is outsourced and shared between 4,000 different actors,” she told the Dagens Nyheter newspaper. “It’s not like that in any other region and it makes healthcare in Stockholm extremely hard to manage.”

The region recently revealed in a press release that 6,600 vaccination appointment times it had offered for vaccination had yet to be booked up, something critics have blamed on the decision to use an online system which many over-70s struggle to understand.

Here’s the official timetable from Region Stockholm.