As things stand right now, I’m scheduled to get the Covid vaccine sometime in the summer.
Let me begin with: okay. If that’s the way it is, getting a vaccine within a year and a half of vaccine research starting is amazing. No complaints.
There are some rumors floating around that vaccines may be opened to everyone sooner. The train of logic is that only vaccinating the most at risk adds a choke point, so in order to get the most doses into arms, vaccinating everyone who might want it may be faster. More vaccinations lead to fewer deaths, hospitalizations, and infections, in order of importance, so open vaccinations might be safer for those at the highest risk than giving it to the highest risk population exclusively. While 90% vaccination/infection rates may be required for herd immunity, how significant are the damping factors of 10% herd immunity? 20%? 30%?
This is all speculation though. We don’t know, and the information to make these estimates as more that WAGs doesn’t exist. We also don’t know how significant that choke point is. Can we vaccinate the most at risk and other people without slowing down vaccinations for the high risk populations? I read a lot of people arguing with each other over this and don’t really think anyone knows. I don’t. In the US, the vaccine has been available for about a month. That isn’t a whole lot of time to extrapolate best practices for 330 million-ish people.
On an unrelated note, don’t you think the Underarmor athletic mask looks like a jockstrap for your face?