So, I did more digging through the vaccine datasets from the state. First, let me say how much I love that they put these out here – they’re broken down to locality & health district, vaccine manufacturer, *and* the number of first & second doses.
In my county, the first second dose was administered on 1/2. Since then, we’ve gotten 89K fully vaccinated. That is definitely not nothing, but it’s also only 10% of our over-18 population. (I really thought we’d sped things up more.)
The county waitlist that was 105K yesterday is 107K today.
We’re getting an average of 1,392 a day to a fully vaccinated status. At that rate, we’ll get through the waitlist by nearly the end of May.
If we can’t increase the vax rate, we don’t hit herd immunity until 2022. (70-95% of the over 18s will take until between March to August of next year at the current rate.)
Our cases *are* dropping in the county – we’re back to early November numbers with a 7 day average of 160 cases a day. (Our peak was a 7 day average of 696 cases a day on 1/17.) So, that looks good.
But – our testing is dropping, too – we’ve never had true full bore surveillance testing here – they’ve gone into some nursing homes and very specific communities, but on the whole, testing has been self-selecting – and that’s how you end up with the mess of massive asymptomatic transmission.
The county is talking up the fact that a) our vax supply should be increasing significantly soon, and they expect J&J vaccines over the next few months, so that’s good, too, cause we need to get more shots in arms to be sure.
But, I’m thinking the J&J vax is going to be a harder sell – public health officials seems to be mainly focused on keeping people out of hospitals (which I totally get – that *is* really important) – but not so much on “how sick can you still get and are we still looking at more long haul cases.” I know the potential for being a long hauler scares the shit out of me. (I’m still pissed at how last year they kept saying, “Oh, the vast majority of cases are “mild” and it took forever for them to admit that mild = no hospitalization, but can still put you flat on your back for two weeks and have unending consequences.)
For people who are very concerned with not getting sick at all, J&J’s efficacy of 70-85% (depending on which article you read) vs. Moderna & Pfizers 90+% efficacy – well, you can tell people “take whatever vaccine you can get” until you’re blue in the face – but people are going to make decisions based on those numbers, because it’s more than just staying out of the hospital.
Musings of a marginally sane feline-appreciating female. 