I was told my previous article was pessimistic because I used testing capacities to estimate vaccination capacities. However, testing may be more complex than vaccination.

I agree that testing is probably more complicated than a simple vaccine shot because, for a test, you have to insert the swab in the nose, wait, read the result and send them a few hours later to the person.

However, even though my reasoning was wrong, the conclusions were unfortunately right, or even optimistic…

For France, I estimated between 50k and 300k shots per day, based on testing capacities in July (~50k/d) and at the all-time high (~300k/d). So between 1.5 and 9 million shots per month. And as main Covid-19 vaccines require two shots, it means between 750k and 4.5M people vaccinated per month. It turns out the French government hopes to vaccinate 1.5M people in about 2 months, so 750k people vaccinated per month. At this pace, it’ll take 2 years to vaccinate 25% of the population (people at risk) and 4 to vaccinate 60% of the population (herd immunity level). Of course, this is just the beginning, and vaccination capacities will, hopefully, improve.

The German government hopes to vaccinate 60% of its population by the end of summer 2021—about 50 million people in 9 months. So 5.5m people vaccinated per month.

In the US, where the all-time high was 1.8 million tests per day (~54m/mo), Joe Biden aims “to distribute 100 million vaccine shots in his initial 100 days in office -- enough to cover 50 million people”, so about 15 million people vaccinated per month. And many experts think his plan is “very optimistic.” At this pace, it’ll take 6 months to vaccinate people at risk (~25% of the population) and 1 year to reach herd immunity (~60%).

So in most developed countries, herd immunity could be reached by the end of 2021 only. (If no mutation resistant to existing vaccines appears…). This is consistent with what Jean-François Delfraissy, President of the French Covid-19 Scientific Committee, said today:

• Covid vaccines won’t have any impact during the first two quarters of 2021,

• The pandemic will only end, thanks to the vaccine, in summer or fall 2021 (so between July and December 2021),

• We still don’t know how long immunity will last with these vaccines.

His conclusion: the beginning of 2021 will be exactly like 2020.

Antoine