Thousands of people are trying to book their Covid booster jabs today and this has led to the NHS website crashing, the government has said.<\/p>\n
Walk-in vaccine centres in England were seeing long queues after Boris Johnson announced an expansion to the booster rollout on Sunday evening, in response to the Omicron variant.<\/p>\n
Booster bookings for over 30s opened from Monday, while 18-29 year olds are due to begin booking on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
An NHS Digital spokesperson said: “The vaccine booking service is facing extremely high demand and is operating a queuing system to manage numbers.<\/p>\n
“We would advise people currently unable to book to try again later today or tomorrow.”<\/p>\n
The Department for Health said the government was looking into the issue which had arisen after the announcement on daily testing.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson advised people to go to local pharmacies where testing kits are still available.<\/p>\n
Under the new policy, people who have been in contact with a Covid case will not need to isolate if the daily tests remain negative for seven days and they have had at least two vaccine doses.<\/p>\n
Anyone who has a positive result from a rapid test should take a confirmatory PCR test to verify the result, as well as continue to self-isolate.<\/p>\n
In the West Midlands, a long queue of about 200 people was forming around a car park and side roads at the back of the vaccination centre in Lye, near Stourbridge.<\/p>\n
People at the front said they had waited for about an hour to reach the entrance, with some people with booked appointments choosing to leave after being forced to wait.<\/p>\n
Health Secretary Sajid Javid said the new highly transmissible Covid-19 variant was spreading at a “phenomenal rate”, with cases doubling every two to three days.<\/p>\n
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Thousands of people are trying to book their Covid booster jabs today and this has led to the NHS website crashing, the government has said. Walk-in vaccine centres in England were seeing long queues after Boris Johnson announced an expansion to the booster rollout on Sunday evening, in response to the Omicron variant. Booster bookings […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":61165,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}