Many people on this website are hardcore social distancers, interacting only with essential workers. To them it seems natural that essential workers are the majority of the transmission and do not have immunity yet. But most people aren’t social distancing very hard at all. In Nashville, were I currently am, the bars and restaurants are often full. My immune brother when to house parties and indoor concerts on New Years Eve. I doubt that essential workers constitute even a majority of current transmission.
So we vaccinate 80 million people and reduce transmission by 50%, maybe. That would take months. Meanwhile, there are only 50 million Americans over 65, doing >90% of the dying, and we could vaccinate them in just two months.
TLDR; The transmission argument for essential workers assumes people comply with social distancing. People aren’t doing that anymore, so vaccinate the vulnerable.
That seems plausible right now, in January, at our current level of social distancing compliance. But why would the degree of distancing stay constant over vaccination? It hasn’t even stayed constant the last 8 months when nobody has been vaccinated.
So far we have a clear pattern. People voluntarily comply when the issue seems important because there are lots of infections, hospitalizations and deaths. During lulls the issue becomes less available and compliance drops. In the best case for essential worker vaccination, it produces a lull in February-March. But if you actually drop the reproduction rate then that 3x factor goes away immediately. Unless you have a reliable plan to get people to keep social distancing even when things seem over, vaccinating the vulnerable saves lives in expectation.
Don’t forget there’s another factor: Coming down with COVID can easily take someone out of the workforce for a couple of weeks.
The essential workers may be at less risk of dying, but depending on how you define “essential” having a large portion of them down for the count could put quite a crimp in your ability to hand out vaccines.
Many people on this website are hardcore social distancers, interacting only with essential workers. To them it seems natural that essential workers are the majority of the transmission and do not have immunity yet. But most people aren’t social distancing very hard at all. In Nashville, were I currently am, the bars and restaurants are often full. My immune brother when to house parties and indoor concerts on New Years Eve. I doubt that essential workers constitute even a majority of current transmission.
So we vaccinate 80 million people and reduce transmission by 50%, maybe. That would take months. Meanwhile, there are only 50 million Americans over 65, doing >90% of the dying, and we could vaccinate them in just two months.
TLDR; The transmission argument for essential workers assumes people comply with social distancing. People aren’t doing that anymore, so vaccinate the vulnerable.
This isn’t based on personal anecdote, sudies that try to estimate this come up with 3x. See eg the MicroCovid page: https://www.microcovid.org/paper/6-person-risk
That seems plausible right now, in January, at our current level of social distancing compliance. But why would the degree of distancing stay constant over vaccination? It hasn’t even stayed constant the last 8 months when nobody has been vaccinated.
So far we have a clear pattern. People voluntarily comply when the issue seems important because there are lots of infections, hospitalizations and deaths. During lulls the issue becomes less available and compliance drops. In the best case for essential worker vaccination, it produces a lull in February-March. But if you actually drop the reproduction rate then that 3x factor goes away immediately. Unless you have a reliable plan to get people to keep social distancing even when things seem over, vaccinating the vulnerable saves lives in expectation.
Don’t forget there’s another factor: Coming down with COVID can easily take someone out of the workforce for a couple of weeks.
The essential workers may be at less risk of dying, but depending on how you define “essential” having a large portion of them down for the count could put quite a crimp in your ability to hand out vaccines.