With 9 days to go in March it looks like we are trending towards having closer to 90M doses of Pfizer and Moderna combined deliveries for the month and 10M doses of JnJ. That’s 20M doses behind the original March 31 projections of the first 100M doses each from Pfizer and Moderna and 20M doses of JnJ. The good news is that at the current pace of deliveries for Moderna and Pfizer they would make up most or all of the 10M shortfall in April and still get to 300M doses delivered by May 1 with the next 100M in May. For JnJ they started shipping again after a short pause and with the added manufacturing capacity from Merck coming online and ramping up soon they have time to catch up. It’s possible they still deliver 50M doses by the end of April. That’s less clear at this time, but it will likely be 40-50M. On vaccinations we still have a pretty steady number of unused doses despite a continuous ramp up in deliveries which leads me to believe that demand is still high and there’s no shortage of capacity to vaccinate or unused inventory would be growing faster.
Here is the updated snapshot of where we are projected to land at the end of March and also at the end of April.
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So we are on pace to have 30% of the total population and 40% of adults started by the end of this month. If deliveries and vaccinations keep pace by the end of April we could have almost 60% of the total population and 78% of adults at least started. If these projections hold up the vaccines will be available to the general public everywhere well before the May 1 deadline. Keep in mind it takes 6 weeks for Moderna, 5 weeks for Pfizer and 2 weeks for JnJ to get from started to the CDC’s definition of fully immune so in order for someone to be fully immune by July 4 they would have to start the Moderna vaccine by May 23, the Pfizer vaccine by May 30 and the JnJ vaccine by June 20. It seems very doable to have pretty close to 60% of the general population and 80% of adults fully immune by July 4th assuming we get that many people to actually go.
Your guess is as good as mine on when we see the impact of the vaccines and when we reach herd immunity. Israel right now is at 57% of the population with at least 1 shot and 50% fully vaccinated which is about where we can/should be by the end of April and their 7 day daily average of cases is now down 88% from their all time high back in January. Could be a pretty good sign of things to come if we all get vaccinated. Down 88% from our all time high would be below 30K cases a day for the US or below 10 cases a day per 100K people. I saw a quote where Fauci said he thought we needed to be under 10K cases a day before major Covid restrictions like masks and distancing could be fully relaxed. That seems like a real possibility by July 4th if we get enough people vaccinated fast enough.