To be fair a lot of vaccination centres are being set up. It’ll be a couple of weeks maybe, but the capacity will increase substantially soon.
even 1 million doses per week is over a year…
How did he come to that figure? Without knowing that, the rest of what he says is meaningless.
Two years at 1 million doses per week as everyone needs two doses.
my brain told me it would be about 18 months - but i couldnt be arsed thnking about. You are probably right
30K doses per day is 150K per week or 7.8 million per year. You need to deliver 2 doses per person so that is approximately 110M/7.8M = 14 years (ish) if no-one takes a day off. I think the 12 years comes from inoculating enough folk to achieve herd immunity IIRC.
Anyhow, the point is that it isn’t going to happen overnight. In the end this will come down to a massive logistics exercise. At the rate of 12 doses per hour per person delivering the vaccine we are going to need a huge number of folk doing 100 injections in an 8 hour day to inoculate 30K per day let alone 300,000 per day, assuming uninterrupted supplies of vaccine in the face of Brexit.
I get the calculation, what I’m asking is where the figure of 30k/day comes from. The capacity (assuming availability) will be much higher than that, surely.
conveyer belts in empty defunct shopping malls and robot injectors
It was an example to illustrate the scale of the task. I can’t remember the other figure he used and I can’t (currently) find the feckin’ article.
That’s my issue. He could have used 300k/day for example.
In 2019 there were >300 million appointments in England alone.
I’m struggling to get away from the suspicion that he’s using a low daily figure to make a political point. YMMV.
Anyway, what we can agree on is that it is a huge logistical task. Hopefully the vax will prove effective, long term. Otherwise we’re back to square one and that’s not even considering mutated strains.
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He did use a larger figure as well IIRC. I’m pretty sure it was in The Guardian so there will be a political slant obviously. Anyhow with SERCO and G4S organsing the whole thing what can possibly go wrong?
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Quite.
In practice they aren’t.
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I hope not. I couldn’t resist the cheap shot. Will it be the army transporting the vaccine to the delivery points when the really large scale centers open up? I see talk of using Football Stadiums (Stadia?) as venues for mass inoculations.
GP surgeries are going to spearhead this initially, they have the resource, clinical facilities and most importantly patient records and a system to identify priority cohorts.
You cannot underestimate just how much capacity General Practice has, delivering c 300 million appointments a year, which could flex up if additional short term resources including volunteers are included. A good proportion of those could be directed towards vaccination clinics (the trick is to keep some people and their presentations away whilst still seeing those who need urgent referrals for things like cancer etc).
At a point a ceiling is reached where the bricks and mortar of surgeries begin to constrain throughput, and this is when organising off site centres, arenas etc could come into play.
The thing that needs to happen though to really hit the kinds of run rates required to vaccinate a critical mass of the population is for the other vaccines to be approved, particularly the Oxford one which is far more scalable than the Pfizer version.
Out of interest how many flu jabs are dispensed each winter?
That is tremendous news, much better than the Pfizer announcement and big show made of it. It would take considerable investment (publicly funded I might add) to use the Pfizer one at scale and even then it would take 1-2 years at best.
Based on the numbers I’ve seen for England (but not devolved nations) the Oxford vaccine opens the door to critical mass within 9 months (with potential to do so within 6).
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Off the top of my head it was about 15m last year, with 75% of over 65s being reached.
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