Military Vaccinating People With COVID-19

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Birmingham plans to use the army to provide extra capacity for its door-to-door COVID-19 vaccinating program.

As the latest figures showed a rise in the number of coronavirus cases in the city over the past five days, the council’s deputy leader Brigid Jones said council staff had been redeployed to its “drop-and-collect” coronavirus testing service.

Military troops will be going door to door in high-risk areas offering testing kits to those with or without symptoms.

She told the meeting: “We have been in talks with the military about them giving us some extra capacity for drop-and-collect.

“It’s very much in an extra capacity, feet-on-the-ground sense. It’s literally just to support the civilian effort side of things and we’ll be in a position next week to confirm whether or not they will be providing extra capacity and how that might be working.”

Ms Jones said of the door-to-door scheme: “We are doing it because these are areas where there are very high levels of Covid and we believe there may be asymptomatic people and other people in the community who haven’t accessed tests.

“We are two weeks into intervention in Birmingham, where we have been asking households not to mix in gardens and homes because those are still the areas where we think we are getting the most cases from, followed by workplaces where social distancing isn’t being observed properly.”

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