Information has been published in the last few days estimating a plausible scenario concerning when we actually might get vaccinated. This comes from Bob Wachter (Twitter: @Bob_Wachter), who is Chair of the UCSF Department of Medicine, and the spokesperson for their public information project which is attempting to fill the vacuum created by a highly politicized CDC (which would normally publish such info). Full Twitter thread here.
The first chart depicts the number of US persons who would receive priority under two different vaccination prioritization schemes. The analysis takes into account that some people can be counted in multiple buckets (e.g. some front line Health Care Workers are over 65 with one of more comorbidities). So they get counted the first time they show up in the prioritization list, and aren’t double-counted when they would otherwise show up in a lower priority group (e.g. one comorbidity).
Personally, I think I would be counted in the one comorbidity bucket (high blood pressure), which means my cohort is 60 million people in the US population, and would get priority from roughly the 70th million person to the 130th million person under either of these schemes.
The next chart shows the USCF’s best estimate of US vaccination administration potential, assuming Pfizer and Moderna both scale up quickly, including the benefits of project Warp Speed.
They’re assuming administration of 25 million vaccinations per month, which suggests my personal (guesstimated) cohort would start getting vaccinated in mid- to late March, and be completed sometime in May. Note that both the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccine require two shots, spaced roughly 3-weeks apart. It’s likely that additional suppliers could join the party, but by definition, they’ll impact the back-end of this graph, not the front-end.
