The United Kingdom is vaccinating 200,000 people against coronavirus every day, with plans to immunise two million people every week.

UK's Health Minister Matt Hancock said that with two million inoculations a week, the country would be able to cover the most vulnerable by the middle of February.

"At the moment we're running over 200,000 people being vaccinated every day," he told Sky News.

Hancock also claimed that the country has vaccinated a third of people aged 80 and above, calling it a "significant progress".

"We've now vaccinated around a third of the over-80s in this country, so we are making significant progress, but there's still further expansion to go. This week we are opening mass vaccination centres", he said.

Britain's Queen Elizabeth recently received the coronavirus vaccine, coinciding with the country passing three million cases, roughly a year after the pandemic began.

Over 1.9 million people across the world have died of the coronavirus. As new variants from Britain and South Africa pop up, cases continue to rise. Owing to this, restrictions have been reintroduced in countries around the world.

Many countries including the UK and US have begun mass inoculations.

On Saturday, Queen Elizabeth II along with her husband Prince Philip received COVID-19 vaccinations, as stated by the Buckingham Palace.

At least 1.5 million people in the UK have received the shots so far, as reported by AFP. This marks the biggest inoculation programme in the country's history, which has prioritised the elderly, their caregivers, as well as healthcare workers.

Britain has so far administered two coronavirus vaccines - one by Pfizer-BioNTech, and the other by Oxford University and AstraZeneca. With the new variants, which are way more infectious, in the picture, the country is racing against time to immunise as many people as possible to bring down the infection rate. (Agency report)

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