Call for volunteers as 500k book boosters in a day

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Call for volunteers as 500k book boosters in a day

More than half a million people booked their Covid booster jabs on Monday - despite the NHS website crashing as thousands sought top-up doses.

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Boris Johnson revealed the figure a day after pledging that boosters would be offered to all over-18s by 31 December.

Long queues formed at walk-in vaccination sites on Monday, with some people waiting five hours to get jabs.

The PM and the NHS are now appealing for volunteers to help get jabs into arms and run vaccination centres.

No 10 said hundreds more sites, mobile units and pop-ups would be set up across the country including at football stadiums, shopping centres and racecourses in the next week, as the UK bids to slow the spread of the Omicron variant.

Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab told BBC Breakfast he accepted there had been "teething problems" in the bid to offer a jab to all adults before the new year, but he hoped they would diminish over the course of the week.

"It does take a few days just to make sure we get to a steady state," he said, adding: "We'll keep straining every sinew to make sure we can reach that target."

One doctor told BBC Radio 4's Today programme there had been an "incredibly rapid reaction" from GPs to assist with the booster rollout at "incredibly short notice".

But Dr Jess Harvey, from Shropshire, urged people frustrated with long queues both at clinics and on booking websites to be patient as "there is increased capacity that's going to be created" in the coming days.

Meanwhile, fully-vaccinated people in England who come into contact with any Covid case should now take daily lateral flow tests for seven days.

Until now, contacts of Omicron cases had to isolate for 10 days. Most unvaccinated adults will still have to isolate if they are contacts of any Covid cases, Omicron or not.

On Monday, ordering lateral flow kits from the government website was temporarily suspended amid high demand.

By the early hours of Tuesday morning, it appeared the tests could once more be ordered from the government website.