Northern Ireland COVID vaccine queue
A 72-year-old with no priority job or clinical risk falls into band 4 of Northern Ireland's 2021 COVID-19 queue, at an estimated place of 243,000. Enter age, occupation and clinical vulnerability to see the band among sixteen and the rough position. Free in your browser.
- Free
- Runs in your browser
- No sign-up
- Your data stays on your device
Run — free
Worked example
- Age
- 72
- Occupation
- Other
- Clinical vulnerability
- None
- Priority band
- 4
- Band
- age_70_74_cev
- Band label
- Adults aged 70–74 and clinically extremely vulnerable people
- Queue position
- 243,000
This Northern Ireland COVID-19 vaccine queue estimator maps age, occupation category, and clinical vulnerability onto the 2021 Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation priority list that the Department of Health in Belfast used for the Health and Social Care vaccination programme. It returns the priority band from 1 through 16 and a rough one-based queue position under frozen 2021 Northern Ireland cohort sizes. Care-home residents and their carers land in band 1. People aged 80 and over and frontline health and social care workers land in band 2. Remaining adults then fall through the published JCVI age and clinical-risk steps, then the later adult and paediatric bands.
How the 2021 JCVI bands become a Northern Ireland queue position
Northern Ireland opened COVID-19 vaccination in December 2020 and January 2021 following the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation priority list, delivered locally by Health and Social Care trusts, general practices, and community pharmacies under the Department of Health in Belfast. Priority band 1 covered residents in a care home for older adults and the staff who cared for them, a small highest-risk cohort frozen here at twenty-eight thousand people.
Priority band 2 covered everyone aged eighty years and over together with frontline health and social care workers, frozen at one hundred and fifty thousand people. Bands 3, 4, and 5 then stepped down by age at seventy-five, seventy, and sixty-five. Band 4 also pulled in clinically extremely vulnerable people who had been advised to shield, even when they were younger than seventy.
Band 6 covered people aged sixteen to sixty-four with an underlying health condition on the JCVI clinical-risk list, and unpaid carers. Bands 7, 8, and 9 finished the original nine-group adult programme at sixty, fifty-five, and fifty years. Remaining adults entered by decade of age in bands 10, 11, and 12.
Remaining sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, adolescents aged twelve to fifteen, children aged five to eleven, and children under five followed as later paediatric bands 13 through 16. This estimator assigns the highest matching band for the submitted profile, then places older people earlier inside that band under a uniform-age assumption on those frozen Northern Ireland cohort sizes. Queue position is one plus the people in all earlier bands plus the estimated number of older people in the current band.
The result is a reproducible teaching number, not a live GP appointment and not a substitute for the booking tools that trusts actually ran.
Where a Northern Ireland vaccine-queue estimator earns its keep, pricing, and limits
Newsrooms and explainer desks reconstructing the 2021 Northern Ireland rollout use a Northern Ireland vaccine queue calculator so a reader can type an age, pick an occupation, declare clinical vulnerability, and see band 4 versus band 10 without scraping archived Department of Health circulars. Civics and public-health classrooms grade the same three-field profile against a deterministic oracle instead of a spreadsheet that silently ranks a sixty-nine-year-old with a seventy-year-old. Failed validation does not consume balance.
This is an educational reconstruction of frozen 2021 Northern Ireland cohort sizes, not a diagnostic medical device, not an official Health and Social Care waitlist, and not advice about whether any person should have been vaccinated. Eligibility rules later changed for children, booster doses, spring campaigns, and trust booking windows; this calculator freezes the original JCVI priority table as Northern Ireland applied it so two clients never drift. People making personal health decisions should follow current official advice from the Public Health Agency and the Department of Health.
What you can do with it
News explainers of the 2021 NI rollout
Let a reader enter age, occupation, and clinical vulnerability and show the matching JCVI priority band plus a rough queue position next to the frozen Northern Ireland cohort sizes.
Classroom civics and public-health grading
Mark three-field vaccine-priority items with a deterministic oracle that rejects an age outside 0–120 and never invents a band outside 1–16.
FAQ
Does clinically extremely vulnerable status move someone earlier?
Children under 16 stay in the paediatric bands unless they are care-home residents.
Is this an official waitlist, and what does it cost?
No. It is an educational reconstruction of frozen 2021 Northern Ireland cohort sizes, not medical advice and not a Health and Social Care booking tool. The browser tool is free.
Which priority band was a 72-year-old in Northern Ireland?
Band 4, which covered people aged 70 to 74 together with clinically extremely vulnerable people. The estimated queue position is 243,000, which means 242,999 people ahead.
Where did unpaid carers sit in the Northern Ireland vaccine queue?
In band 6, alongside people aged 16 to 64 with an underlying health condition on the JCVI clinical-risk list. That band came after the age steps down to sixty-five.
How is the queue position in Northern Ireland estimated?
It is one plus everyone in the earlier bands plus the estimated number of older people in the same band, using frozen 2021 Northern Ireland cohort sizes. It is a teaching number, not a GP appointment.
Related tools
For developers — API access
Everything on this page is available programmatically. This section is for teams who want to wire it into their own systems; everyone else can just use the tool above.
API endpoint
Prefer to automate it? One authenticated POST creates the task; the result comes back by webhook or a signed link. The same capability also runs here on the web, by email and from Telegram — and soon from our app too.
Call it from your stack
curl -X POST https://api.kit.forhosting.com/health/vaccine-queue-northern-ireland \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $KIT_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"age":72,"occupation":"other","clinical_vulnerability":"none"}'const res = await fetch("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/health/vaccine-queue-northern-ireland", {
method: "POST",
headers: {
"Authorization": `Bearer ${process.env.KIT_KEY}`,
"Content-Type": "application/json"
},
body: JSON.stringify({
"age": 72,
"occupation": "other",
"clinical_vulnerability": "none"
})
});
const { task_id } = await res.json();import os, requests
res = requests.post(
"https://api.kit.forhosting.com/health/vaccine-queue-northern-ireland",
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['KIT_KEY']}"},
json={
"age": 72,
"occupation": "other",
"clinical_vulnerability": "none"
},
)
task_id = res.json()["task_id"]<?php
$res = file_get_contents("https://api.kit.forhosting.com/health/vaccine-queue-northern-ireland", false, stream_context_create([
"http" => [
"method" => "POST",
"header" => "Authorization: Bearer " . getenv("KIT_KEY") . "\r\nContent-Type: application/json",
"content" => '{"age":72,"occupation":"other","clinical_vulnerability":"none"}',
],
]));
$task = json_decode($res, true);body := bytes.NewBufferString(`{"age":72,"occupation":"other","clinical_vulnerability":"none"}`)
req, _ := http.NewRequest("POST", "https://api.kit.forhosting.com/health/vaccine-queue-northern-ireland", body)
req.Header.Set("Authorization", "Bearer "+os.Getenv("KIT_KEY"))
req.Header.Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
res, _ := http.DefaultClient.Do(req)Example request
{
"age": 72,
"occupation": "other",
"clinical_vulnerability": "none"
}Example response
{
"task_id": "tsk_a1b2c3d4e5f6a1b2c3d4e5f6",
"type": "health.vaccine_queue_northern_ireland",
"status": "queued",
"_links": {
"result": "/tasks/tsk_…/result"
}
}The API is asynchronous: the call returns a task_id immediately and the result arrives by webhook. Polling is capped at 1 req/s per task.
Pricing
Published price — no tokens, no invented credits. A failed task is never charged.
Errors
| HTTP | Code | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
401 | unauthorized | Missing or invalid API key. |
402 | insufficient_balance | Your balance doesn't cover the task price. |
404 | unknown_type | That task type doesn't exist. |
429 | rate_limited | Too many requests. Use the webhook instead of polling. |
Technical notes
An age outside the closed interval 0 to 120 fails with invalid_input and is not billed.
Input contract, response shape, and error behaviour
Finite-domain values are enums so the form paints a select instead of a free-text trap. An age below 0 or above 120 fails with the explicit message that age must be between 0 and 120 — that is the product promise, and those failures are not billed. Optional keys are omitted rather than set to null. POST a JSON body with three required fields. age is a finite number of completed years from 0 through 120 inclusive; numeric strings such as "72" are accepted, as is the alias age_years. occupation is one of the closed categories care_home_staff, frontline_health_social_care, unpaid_carer, or other; the alias occupation_category is accepted. clinical_vulnerability is none, underlying_condition, clinically_extremely_vulnerable, or care_home_resident; the aliases clinical_status and vulnerability are accepted. A missing field, a non-finite age, or an occupation or clinical-vulnerability value outside the enum fails with invalid_input naming the field. On success the body echoes age, occupation, and clinical_vulnerability, reports priority_band as an integer from 1 through 16, and reports priority_label in plain language. band and band_label name the sub-cohort used for ranking. queue_position is the one-based estimate; people_ahead is queue_position minus one. method is always jcvi_northern_ireland_2021 so clients can pin the rule set. notes restates why that band was chosen. This endpoint does not collect postcode, GP practice, trust, or pregnancy status, so it cannot reproduce every JCVI footnote; it reproduces the three public levers people actually remember: age, occupation, and clinical vulnerability. Pair the numbers with your own explainer copy if you need a chart of remaining first doses; this endpoint ranks one profile and does not emit plots.
Where a Northern Ireland vaccine-queue estimator earns its keep, pricing, and limits
Keep requests small, pin priority_band and queue_position in tests, and you get a reproducible Northern Ireland vaccine-queue estimate for homework, graphics, and edge workers without standing up a booking stack of your own.
Integration use cases
Historical timelines and museum interactives
Drive a kiosk or documentary companion from the same parse contract the API bills, so the free widget and the archive backend never disagree on a Belfast or Derry profile.
Technical questions
How is the Northern Ireland COVID vaccine queue position estimated?
The calculator assigns the highest matching 2021 JCVI priority band from age, occupation, and clinical_vulnerability, then ranks inside that band with older people first. queue_position is one plus people in earlier bands and older people in the current band.
What happens if age is outside 0 to 120?
The task fails with invalid_input and the message that age must be between 0 and 120. Invalid input is not billed.
Which occupations map to the earliest JCVI bands?
care_home_staff maps to band 1 with care-home residents. frontline_health_social_care maps to band 2 with people aged 80 and over. unpaid_carer maps to band 6 for people aged 16–64 unless an earlier age or clinical rule already applies.