Why are we classifying the goal as 70% of adults?
I agree, I really dislike that the metric is "of adults". Just as bad when it's "of eligible". It should just be "of population", no need to do fancy math on what that means. If that means the target is different, that's fine just say what that target is.
We were also talking about adults getting to 70% not total. The 16 and 17 year olds are in your total number. Not a huge difference but part of it and that will grow in the next few weeks.
A super good reason why the metric should be "of people". When Thursday's new vaccination number comes out, not all of it will advance the goal of "of adults". The whole number wasn't in the past either, but it'll be worse now.
Yes, there will be a noticeable bump in first doses over the next 1-2 weeks. But may not be easy to separate how much of that is just the newly eligible 12-15 year olds, versus adults.
So daily vaccination rates are definitely about to improve. But how much of that is adults, remains to be seen.
Making it harder to know where we are.
People and the news WILL confuse the two. We'll see lots of comments and news stories on how many were vaccinated and how that gets us closer to the goal, but it'll be over counting the daily contribution.
Total population or just adults? Shouldn't the goal be to drop restrictions when the situation warrants it? So you think even if cases flatline and deaths are nearly zero keep the restrictions anyway? To get to 75% of Americans vaccinated we would need 97% of adults to go. There’s no way to hit that level until all kids are eligible which is probably towards the end of the year. I’m all for setting a reasonable vaccination target that will likely lead to cases and stats being good, but it’s a balancing act. “Good enough“ to get the cases way down is the goal.
Which is why everyone using "of population" would have been better.
Better yet would have been metrics based on spread, but we've all determined that's to hard and to abstract. Settling on Vaccinated was always a proxy. As such, it was also always more conservative than it needs to be. It would be so much worse to set a proxy measure that's to aggressive and doesn't actually lead to the spread reduction. Especially as the spread reduction will lag the vaccinated metric.
Let's say we told everyone that 35% was enough (to exaggerate wildly) and then when got there, there were still 500+ people dying everyday. There would be outcry, calls of useless science, how could the number be so far off, we cannot trust anything anymore. It would be bad. So instead, the metric is conservative and errors on the other side. We'll probably get the outcome we want first before we hit it. But, it's only "probably" not "definitely" and nobody giving a target wants that risk. Combine in all the "of adults" and other fudge factors and the target is going to error on the side of even more conservative.
Even in the reporting of the "70% of adults by July 4" target, the assumptions of what that really means are all over the place. Many will be disappointed if getting there doesn't mean "everything is dropped". No matter if that's what was meant or not.