Photographer: David Paul Morris / Bloomberg
Photographer: David Paul Morris / Bloomberg
When will the pandemic end? It is the question that has been hanging over almost everything since Covid-19 conquered the world last year. The response can be measured in vaccinations.
Bloomberg has built the largest database of Covid-19 vaccines supplied worldwide, with more than 108 million doses administered worldwide. U.S. scientific officials, like Anthony Fauci, have suggested that coverage of 70% to 85% of the population will be needed to get things back to normal. Bloomberg’s The Vaccine Tracker shows that some countries are making much faster progress than others, using 75% coverage with a two-dose vaccine as a target.
Israel, the country with the highest vaccination rate in the world, is moving towards 75% coverage in just 2 months. The United States will arrive just in time to announce the New Year 2022 (although North Dakota may arrive there six months before Texas). With vaccinations happening more quickly in Western countries richer than the rest of the globe, it will take the world as a whole 7.4 years at its current pace.
Bloomberg’s calculator provides a snapshot of time, designed to put today’s vaccination rates in perspective. It uses the most recent moving average of vaccinations, which means that as the number of vaccinations increases, the time required to reach the 75% limit will fall.
Calculations will be volatile, especially in the early days of implementation, and the numbers can be distorted by temporary interruptions.
For example, New York’s target date has been postponed to 17 months this week after a winter the blizzard prevented some from being vaccinated. Likewise, Canada’s vaccination rate has halved in recent weeks, after reports of delays in vaccine shipments. Based on Canada’s most recent vaccination rate, it would take 9.7 years to reach 75% coverage. This may serve as a wake-up call for Canadian politicians and health officials, but it does not mean that they are doomed to a decade of social detachment. Canada has contracts to buy more doses of vaccine per person than any other country, and their vaccination rates are expected to rise.
The pace is likely to accelerate further as more vaccines become available. Some of the largest vaccine manufacturing centers in the world, in India and Mexico, are just getting started. More than 8.5 billion doses of the vaccine have been contracted by countries through more than 100 agreements monitored by Bloomberg. Only a third of the countries started their vaccination campaigns.
Vaccinations protect against Covid-19 just weeks after receiving the vaccines. But if only a few people in a community are vaccinated, the virus can continue to spread without being controlled. As more people get the vaccine, groups of people begin to build a collective defense against the virus, so that isolated sparks of infection dissipate rather than spread in an outbreak. The concept is known as herd immunity.
In the scientific community, there are conflicting definitions for when collective immunity is achieved. Is it when enough people are protected that it begins to have a measurable effect on transmission speed? This can start well before 75% of people are fully vaccinated. Others define it as the point at which outbreaks can no longer be sustained. For example, even if there is a group of measles cases in an unvaccinated community, herd immunity prevents it from spreading across the country.
How we run the numbers
The vaccines available today require two doses for complete vaccination. Our coverage calculations are based on two doses per person in the population, but make no distinction between the first doses and the second doses administered. Such malfunctions can distort daily vaccination rates and are not available in more than 20% of the countries we are monitoring.
A new vaccine from Johnson & Johnson recently showed positive results using a single dose in a large clinical trial. If approved, we will adjust the number of doses required in proportion to your market share in each country.
Vaccines have not been authorized for use in children – these studies are ongoing. Our calculator, like the virus, includes children in the population that need to be protected.
One metric that the Bloomberg calculator does not take into account is any level of natural immunity that may result from Covid-19’s recovery. It is possible that the most affected sites will require a lower level of vaccination to prevent widespread transmission. While there is evidence that people recovering from illness maintain some level of natural defenses, it is unclear how much protection is offered or how long it can last. The vaccine is still recommended for people who have recovered from the disease.
The calculator is the latest feature of Bloomberg’s Covid-19 Tracker. The projections are updated daily and are based on the average daily vaccinations on data collected from 67 countries and from US states and territories. Countries can be excluded when they are in the early stages of vaccination or if they provide infrequent updates on their vaccination numbers.
More than 108 million shots were fired. See the latest numbers for the Bloomberg Covid-19 Vaccine Tracker