Vaccine Hunger Games

 As noted in an earlier posts (here and here), despite a lot of fanfare, "Operation Warp Speed" was all hype. In a story by CNN yesterday Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips, chief clinical officer of a 51-hospital system, describes the shitshow: 

It feels like the feds' plan stopped at the state borders, and the states expected the feds' plan to stop at people's arms. I think having a federal plan would absolutely stop the kind of "Hunger Games" approach to every individual state, every individual county scrambling for their own set of rules.

The story notes that the incoming Biden team plans to ramp-up vaccinations.  What does the ramp look like so far? The following chart (from here) shows cumulative doses per 100 people in the UK, US, and Canada:

Since this is the number of people out of 100 who have received vaccine, it can be interpreted as a percent. The UK (11%) is doing quite a bit better than us (7%). Canada (2%) is doing quite a bit worse. The lines are bending upward (for the UK and US at least), an indication that the pace is picking up.  

Here is another way of looking at the data, which gives us a clearer idea about whether and how vaccinations are accelerating. I took the same data as used to generate the chart above and computed a first-difference. This subtracts the value on a given day from the value on the previous day.  If things are ramping up, then the amount of change should increase with each day. I calculated a seven-day trailing average of these change numbers to smooth-out jumpiness in the UK and US figures (probably due to inconsistent reporting).

Even with averaging the US and UK numbers are a little uneven but we can still get an idea of the direction things are going.  

Canada is almost flat, increasing its vaccination rate at fairly steady a tenth of a percent per day.  The UK looks to be steadily increasing the number of people per 100 vaccinated each day.  The US stayed more or less flat until January 19. But now we seem to be increasing at a slightly higher pace than the UK since then.  

Still we are increasing vaccinated people only slightly more than 1/3 of a person per hundred per day.  We will have to do a lot better than that to get the 50% to 80% of people we need vaccinated to get the pandemic under control.  Perhaps it will happen now that we have an administration that cares and knows what it's doing.

Image by Jae Rue from Pixabay