This was originally a Facebook post of mine from 2021-3-9, and is archived here as a curiosity. Minor changes to formatting, as well as basic copy-edits, may have been made in the transition from Facebook post to web format.
It's not Friday yet, but here's a little vaccine math, just to illustrate how close we are to everyone who is serious about getting vaccinated getting vaccinated. The government promises of vaccines for all adults by mid-May are, if anything, underselling things slightly. Here's why.
The United States has a population of 328 million.[1] However, just 74.3% of Americans are adults,[2] which gives us 244 million adults.[3]
According to recent polling data from Pew research, just 51% of Americans say they either already have or definitely will get a Covid vaccine. Another 17% say they probably will.[4] Let's leave the "probably" folks aside for now. They're not in a hurry.
51% of 244 million adults is 124 million adults who have decided to get the vaccine.[5]
The CDC reports that 61 million Americans have already gotten the vaccine.[6] This means that of the 124 million adults who have decided to get the vaccine, just 63 million are still waiting for their first shot.
Now, the CDC is reporting that about 123 million vaccine doses have shipped, and about 93 million vaccine doses have been stuck into arms.[6-1] That means there's about 30 million shots already shipped waiting for arms to go into.[7]
Now, because it either takes one or two shots to fully vaccinate a person, depending on the type of vaccine used, we can say that those 30 million shots are enough to vaccinate at least 15 million people. It'll be more than that, but let's stick with 15 million so we don't oversell this thing.
Now, that means that of the 63 million people who definitely want a vaccine but haven't gotten a shot yet, at least 15 million can be vaccinated with vaccines that already shipped out, while at most 48 million are waiting on shots that haven't shipped yet.
So after accounting for people already vaccinated and shots already shipped, the people who definitely want a vaccine number 48 million. How long will it take to ship out vaccines for 48 million people?
For the month of March, the vaccine manufacturers claim they're on track to ship enough vaccines to vaccinate three million people per day.
48 million people waiting to be vaccinated, with their vaccines shipping at a rate of 3 million people per day, would suggest just 16 days worth of additional vaccine shipments could cover the rest of the people who know they want a vaccine. And 16 days from now is March 25th.
If that math holds -- and it might not because predicting the future is a risky business -- that places us a little over two weeks from having enough vaccines to vaccinate all the people who definitely want it.
The 41 million Americans who "probably" want the vaccine would take just another two weeks, bringing us to April 8th.
That's still under a month from now, and over a month ahead of the government's current timetable. A big part of the difference comes down to the difference between shipping enough vaccines for every adult, and shipping enough vaccines for every adult who wants one. The second is a much quicker task.
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