Winning The Vaccination Lottery: Random Selection Starts This Week

Priority groups are the main focus of this week’s vaccination schedule. People from priority groups, not already having received a vaccination offer, will be offered their shot this week, according to the official vaccination schedule on the capital area’s health care website. In case some vaccines are leftover from those priority groups, there is the possibility now to be randomly chosen for receiving an offer – it remains to be seen whether the probability is the same as in the regular lottery.

About 13,300 people will be vaccinated against Covid-19 in the coming days.

Priority groups will be finished

It will be attempted to finish vaccinating people born in 1975 and earlier. The Pfizer vaccine will be used tomorrow, Moderna on Wednesday, and Janssen on Thursday. 20,000 additional doses of the Pfizer vaccine are on their way to Iceland in the coming week. Ragnheiður Ósk Erlendsdóttir, director of nursing at the Capital Area Health Care, told RÚV that if there is a surplus of vaccines after the vaccinations of the priority groups, random vaccinations will be given.

Randomized vaccinations coming

“It works in such a way that we are going to put all the remaining cohorts in a certain hat or mug and then draw, either men or women from the relevant cohort,” Ragnheiður says.

According to Ragnheiður, the drawing method was planned to be more of a digital nature, but some complications followed. “We were supposed to program a system first, but then there were so many tasks with our programmers. So we saw that this would be the simplest. This approach is fairly fair and we will see how the attendance will be on Tuesday.”

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