It’s looking likely that the pandemic will de facto end on the Summer Solstice.
Biden promised vaccine availability for everyone on May 1st. May 1st plus two weeks to get appointments plus four weeks spacing between two doses of Moderna plus one week waiting for full effectiveness, is June 19. The astronomical solstice is June 20, which is a Sunday.
Things might not go to plan, if the May 1st vaccine-availability deadline is missed, or a vaccine-evading strain means we have to wait for a booster. No one’s organizing the details yet, as far as I know. But with all those caveats aside:
My understanding was that the May 1st date was “Everyone’s now allowed to sign up for an appointment, but you may be at the end of a long queue.” How long after that do you think it will take to get a vaccine to everyone who wants one?
Currently, 2.4 million shots/day. Note that it’s a situation where it’s always going to be limited by the rate limiting step, and there are many bottlenecks, so using the ‘current’ data and extrapolating only a modest increase is the most conservative estimate.
210 million adults. Only 0.7 need to be vaccinated for the risk to plummet for everyone else. A quick bit of napkin math says we need 294 million doses to fully vaccinate everyone, and we are at 52 million now. (294-52) = 242million/2.4 = 100.8 more days.
This is why the lesser J&J vaccine is actually so useful—if we switched all the vaccine clinics and syringe supplies to J&J overnight (if there was enough supply of the vaccine itself) suddenly we only need 121 million doses to vaccinate everyone, or 50.4 more days.
The reality is that increasing efforts are probably going to help, and the J&J is helping, but sooner or later a bottleneck will be hit that can’t be bypassed quickly (like a syringe shortage), so I would predict the reality number of days to fall in that (50, 100) day interval.
There are 94 days between now and June 19. Also, a certain percentage of the population are going to refuse the shot in order to be contrarian or because they earnestly believe their aunt’s facebook rants. Morever, the ‘get an appointment’ game means the tech savvy/people who read reddit get an advantage over folks who aren’t.
So for those of us reading this who don’t yet qualify, it doesn’t appear that it will be much longer.
It’s looking likely that the pandemic will de facto end on the Summer Solstice.
Biden promised vaccine availability for everyone on May 1st. May 1st plus two weeks to get appointments plus four weeks spacing between two doses of Moderna plus one week waiting for full effectiveness, is June 19. The astronomical solstice is June 20, which is a Sunday.
Things might not go to plan, if the May 1st vaccine-availability deadline is missed, or a vaccine-evading strain means we have to wait for a booster. No one’s organizing the details yet, as far as I know. But with all those caveats aside:
It’s going to be a hell of a party.
My understanding was that the May 1st date was “Everyone’s now allowed to sign up for an appointment, but you may be at the end of a long queue.” How long after that do you think it will take to get a vaccine to everyone who wants one?
Currently, 2.4 million shots/day. Note that it’s a situation where it’s always going to be limited by the rate limiting step, and there are many bottlenecks, so using the ‘current’ data and extrapolating only a modest increase is the most conservative estimate.
210 million adults. Only 0.7 need to be vaccinated for the risk to plummet for everyone else. A quick bit of napkin math says we need 294 million doses to fully vaccinate everyone, and we are at 52 million now. (294-52) = 242million/2.4 = 100.8 more days.
This is why the lesser J&J vaccine is actually so useful—if we switched all the vaccine clinics and syringe supplies to J&J overnight (if there was enough supply of the vaccine itself) suddenly we only need 121 million doses to vaccinate everyone, or 50.4 more days.
The reality is that increasing efforts are probably going to help, and the J&J is helping, but sooner or later a bottleneck will be hit that can’t be bypassed quickly (like a syringe shortage), so I would predict the reality number of days to fall in that (50, 100) day interval.
There are 94 days between now and June 19. Also, a certain percentage of the population are going to refuse the shot in order to be contrarian or because they earnestly believe their aunt’s facebook rants. Morever, the ‘get an appointment’ game means the tech savvy/people who read reddit get an advantage over folks who aren’t.
So for those of us reading this who don’t yet qualify, it doesn’t appear that it will be much longer.