Dr Ivan Muscat explained that despite case numbers in the UK – where the majority of visitors to the Island travel from – dropping to pre-winter levels, arrivals will still have to isolate for a period of ten days.
‘The numbers outside Jersey are still very high,’ he said. ‘They are lower than they were, which is great, and the lower they become the better for the individual countries and the better across the globe, but the other reason for being very careful is variants. We know that the Kent variant in the UK has led to the very high numbers that they saw in the autumn period. We feel that we did have the Kent variant in Jersey in December, which led to the spike that we saw. We have now verified that we have got the Kent variant in Jersey and so we really need to be careful, because that is much more transmissible.
‘What we haven’t got and what we do not want to have is the more vaccine-resistant variants [such as the South Africa and Brazil strains]. We do not want that to be brought into Jersey, so I think we do need to maintain our border controls. I should add that the vaccines that are available still have activity against the variant but they have lower efficacy, so keeping it at bay means we will benefit more from our vaccine process.’
Yesterday, it was announced that 74% of ‘clinically extremely vulnerable’ (high risk) Islanders aged 16 to 69 had received their first vaccine dose.
As of last Sunday there have been 22,696 first doses of the vaccine administered, as well as 3,256 second doses, bringing the total number of doses per 100 people in the population to 24.07 – slightly higher than the UK’s figure of 23.33.
Additionally, 94% of care-home residents and 78% of care-home staff have received their first dose, while 80% of residents and 60% of staff had also received their second dose.
Both Dr Muscat and vaccine programme lead Becky Sherrington said it was very important that Islanders continued following the health guidance, despite the great strides being made with the rollout of injections.
‘Just because we are vaccinating people at the rate that we are does not mean to say that people should stop being careful,’ said Dr Muscat, who added that ‘we must continue to be careful’ to give the vaccine programme enough time to be fully deployed.
