Today the government has announced that they have vaccinated more than 130,000 people in the first week since they began. Which is absolutely fantastic news. Except...
Firstly, they haven't vaccinated anyone yet - all three of the vaccines require two doses, significantly spread in time. So what they've actually done is given 130k people the first dose. That's not the same thing.
Significantly more concerning, though, is what that says about the overall problem. The thing is, 130,000 people is indeed a lot. But the population of the UK is 66.65 million or so.
What that means is that to get to everyone, if we proceed at that rate, we'll take more than 9 years. Just for the first dose. (Fortunately, you don't need to get to everyone... just 80% of people. So that's 7 years and 9 months.)
I really don't mean to denigrate the achievements here. Just getting the vaccine out is fantastic, and delivering 130,000 doses is great.
But the news isn't as good as is being made out. We really need to be targeting at least 300k doses delivered per day - at least a 15-fold increase in the rate. That would allow us to deal with the virus in about a year.
Perhaps more important even than that, we need a media that actually provide that context, because big numbers are seductive and can be misleading.
No comments:
Post a Comment