Vaccinate, dammit.
The turmoil of President Trump’s final days in office are sucking up almost all the front page real estate, Twitter chatter capacity and raw attention that Americans have, right now. It is hard to turn away from a train wreck.
But we need to do that, because in our distraction, we are losing critical time in battling the coronavirus pandemic.
In early December, a mutation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was discovered for the first time in the UK. Mutation is common in viruses, but no mutant strain before this one caused much alarm among epidemiologists. This time, though, they’re worried. It appears that the mutation, while not necessarily deadlier than other variants, is more transmissible.
That’s bad.
Say that 1,000 people in a town have the coronavirus, and each person who has it infects, on average, 1.5 other people. Each of those people, of course, also infects 1.5 other people, as the pandemic spreads. After five cycles of infection, more than eleven thousand people will have the disease. If the virus kills one in a thousand of those infected, eleven will die.
Now imagine that the mutated virus is twice as transmissible — instead of each infected person passing the disease to 1.5 other people, on average, 3 people are infected. In that case, after five rounds of infection, 729,000 people will have the disease. Instead of eleven dead, we’d expect 729 to die.
I started with 1,000 cases because it makes the math easy. In the US yesterday, 280,000 people were newly diagnosed with the disease.
Changes in transmissibility increase cases, and therefore total deaths, exponentially. Every day we allow the virus to continue to circulate, we feed that exponential function.
Isolation and masks remain critical tools in slowing the spread. But it is especially urgent now to get one of the three — soon to be more! — vaccines into as much of the population as possible. We have the tools we need to end the pandemic, return to work, and recover from the economic and health devastation the pandemic brought us.
That’s why it so absolutely infuriating to see the US rolling out the vaccine so slowly. Right now, we’re inoculating about 370,000 people per day:
That seems like a lot, and looks good, compared to other countries. But the total US population is 332 million people. At the current rate, it’ll take us two and a half years to inject everyone in the country one time — and all the vaccines we have require two doses!
Look at how much more effective Israel has been in its vaccination program:
Counting shots is a little tricky — some folks may have gotten the initial shot and booster, others may have gotten only one dose so far. But at about 20 shots for every 100 citizens, Israel may already have vaccinated twenty percent of its population. The US, by contrast, is at less than one-tenth of that — just 1.79% of the population, at most, so far.
Joe Biden has promised to ramp up vaccinations in the US to one million doses per day. Again, seems like a lot, but in fact it’s not quite three times the number we’re doing now. That means it’ll still be nearly two years before everyone’s gotten two shots.
It’s hard to understand. Given the economic devastation we’ve endured, given the 350,000 lives lost in the US so far, the more than 4,000 people who died just yesterday, we ought to be on an absolute war footing against this virus. We should be spending whatever it takes to produce vaccine at scale, and to arrange our logistics to meet the example that Israel has set.
We’ll dither in distraction until January 20, when the new administration will assume office and responsibility for our virus response. I profoundly hope there are big thinkers who realize that a million shots a day is woefully inadequate.
