The US likely has something like 50 million people with acquired immunity (14.5 million have tested positive) and another 50 million people are slated to be vaccinated by March (this estimate is assuming weeks after the second doses), with tens of millions more each following month, so it can be sometime next year that the pandemic is waning here.
I’m skeptical that vaccine production and distribution will in the US will scale that well. I certainly hope that it will happen, but given that the country has failed on just about every other pandemic related front tempers my perspective.
It’s not going to scale at all. There were three hour lines just this month to get the rapid test, and we’re months into this.
Unless the federal government gets real with it, and releases an app that leverages scheduling systems to mass coordinate a roll out, this too will be a clusterfuck. The healthcare administrative staff (your standard hospital/clinical administrative staff) is not innovative enough at the moment to adapt to the challenge.
The cold chain for the Pfizer vaccine is tougher, but otherwise it's not radically different than flu vaccination (we do ~150 million of those each year in the US). The production estimates are coming from the vaccine companies also, so less likely to be victims of the administrative decline.
Even achieving something comparable to prior year’s flu vaccination would not bring us anywhere close to the herd immunity threshold though. I’m not as concerned with production of the vaccine itself as the logistics involved. I find it hard to believe that a country that otherwise can’t deliver the basic protective necessities to frontline workers is suddenly going to pull out a logistical miracle out of their hats.
Something like 5 or 10 million people are acquiring natural immunity each week right now (it's maybe not that high, but there are 1 million+ positive tests each week, with quite high positivity rates, which indicates testing isn't sufficient to find all cases). It's a grim statistic, but the raging spread of the virus is accelerating the timetable for reaching herd immunity.
140 million vaccinated (approx the number of flu vaccinations administered last year) + tens of millions with natural immunity does put us close to the herd immunity threshold (the number of people that have immunity from an infection has big error bars of course, and there will likely be overlap)
The 14.5 million are cases that have been identified with a positive test. There are certainly more people that have been infected than that, the only question is how many.
Distributed, probably so. I don't see any reason to doubt the manufacturers statements yet, and I'm not including the potential/likely J&J vaccine.
And while we don't know how long acquired immunity lasts, it's pretty clear that it lasts a good while (it's still a freak occurrence when someone tests positive after recovering from a first infection).
It seems right now we're at 10-15% positivity on PCR. And I think that probably maps onto society... So there's a vague guess how many will test positive with PCR.
Unfortunately a PCR result at a 35 cycle threshold (which the vast majority of tests in the U.S. are) does not prove that a person was infected and has immunity, only that there was exposure that is detectable. It may never even have entered the bloodstream.
Only antibody testing will show if there was a immune response and if there is immune memory. We're not doing that at scale.
No Politicians framed the issue like this. Canceling school in 3 month bursts is a political move because it's much harder to tell a generation of parents their kids won't return to school for 2-3 years.
Shame on our politicians, shame of Fauci for not making this clear.
