B.1.1.7 variant first seen in UK will be dominant by end of March

If we do our job, we can vaccinate everyone over 65 by then

And every teacher

And all school staff

A pipe dream? No – doable.

But hard

Lets look at some numbers to see why I'm optimistic

Thread
Right now, we have 26M people who have gotten only 1 dose

They need the second dose

How many folks >65 still haven't received any vaccine?

35 million

Even if we do a 1M first doses per say focused on seniors, it'll take us until late march to get 1 dose into all of them

2/9
We can get 2nd dose into about half (remember, have to wait 3-4 weeks between doses)

So we need 52M doses to get all remaining 35M seniors at least one dose and half their 2nd dose

What about teachers? 3.2M teachers in America

But schools have other staff too!

3/9
Best estimates are about 2M staff -- but if we round up,

6M teachers/staff

Imagine we rush to get all teachers and staff fully vaccinated by 3/31

That’s another 12M doses needed

That’s 90M doses need

This assumes no double counting and zero hesitancy

4/9
Obviously too aggressive

Assumes no teacher has already gotten vaccinated

Assumes no teacher/staff >65 (probably 10-15% are)

And assumes no vaccine hesitancy – that everyone will want it

Realistically? need closer to 75M doses if 80% uptake among seniors, teachers

5/9
How many will we have?

We have 17M doses of Pfizer/Moderna in freezers at states now

And we are close to producing, distributing 2M doses a day

41 days until 3/31 --> 82M doses

So we should have produced, distributed 99M doses by 3/31

This assumes no J&J vaccine

6/9
So we’ll have about 100M doses to administer between now and 3/31

2.5M doses a day

We can administer that if we have supply

And will need 75M to:

1. Finish current folks
2. Give two doses to teachers/staff
3. Two doses to half remaining seniors
4. Single dose to other half
We can finish 2nd doses for of rest of seniors early April

And vaccinate other high risk folks then too

Bottom line?

We should have enough vaccines for high risk folks before UK variant dominant

Need flawless execution

But its doable

And I think we can do this

End
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