Hello Everyone - I just wanted to chime in here, because I am as anxious as everyone else to get vaccinated so I can resume something that resembles my pre-Covid life.

First, let me say we need to acknowledge that it is remarkable beyond anything I have ever seen that we even have a vaccine 12 months after this virus was first identified! (It took researchers almost 20 years to develop the polio vaccine.) It is true that there has not been as much planning for the orderly delivery of the vaccine as we would like, but I believe most people doubted there could possibly be a vaccine this quickly.

Remember too, the same public health staff responsible for vaccine delivery planning has been overwhelmed just dealing with the pandemic itself for the past 10 months, and received little guidance or funding to help with the rollout. Finally, our health care providers are DEPLETED from this past year, and we are asking them to undertake another monumental task.

If you've seen my posts before, you know I am a research nerd, so I just did a little math.

20 million doses of vaccine have been delivered in the past 2 1/2 weeks, during a time that included 2 major holidays and some major winter storms. That is enough to vaccinate 10 million people. 4-5 million doses have been injected so far, in 18 days. That's remarkable - about 225,000 doses a day, or 400,000 a day if you just count "business" days. Depending on whose estimate you accept, another 50 - 100 million doses will be delivered by February, for 25 - 50 million more people.

There are:
20 million front-line health care workers
2 million long-term care residents
2 million law enforcement and fire fighters
20 other essential front-line workers (delivery, cashiers, utility & public works, food production, day care providers, transportation & truckers, etc)
4 million K-12 educations workers (incl aides, bus drivers, etc)
18 million over age 75

That's 66 million people needing over 130 million doses of vaccine. That accounts for all of the vaccine we can expect to be delivered in the next 6 weeks.

As you can see, unless you fall into one of the categories above, it is mathematically unlikely that you will be receiving a vaccine in the next few weeks or maybe even months.

The way I see it, no matter how much I would like to travel, or to eat out, or ____, it's hard to justify trying to "jump the line" even though I am 69 and high risk, and my husband is over 70 and also high risk.

So in the meantime. I will mask up, wash my hands, avoid close contact, and try to be patient.

Sue

Jump to this post