We are all hoping the vaccination will end this. But vaccination is only one way people are immunised – the other way is to get infected.
Today we are looking at 60,000 people being infected a day (about 400,000 a week). I started to wonder about the effect of both infection and the virus along with lockdown.
I did a simple calculation or two. First I assumed we start with 40,000 infections a day (lower than we currently have, but I am guessing the 60,000 is high because of a Christmas blip). The difference is not that important as far as this goes.
The orange keeps the same R value we have today, and the blue assumes the lockdown reduces R to 1.0.
The bars are the weekly infections and the lines are the total.
The thing is, the pool of people that can be infected reduces really quickly. Because of this even a fairly high R value eventually stops being effective – that happens when the number of vaccinations exceed the number of infections.
So without lockdown this suggests the number of infections per week will peak at 1.5 times the starting level, and that will be in February. With lockdown the level of infection will be about 0.5 the current value around the same time.
Okay, these are very rough guesses , but the idea is to let you see the effect of lockdown during the vaccine roll-out. It can make a massive difference.
You can look at the differences between lines – this suggests the lockdown could easily half the people that get infected. By the way – because the vaccination programme targets the most vulnerable the effect on death rate would be even more significant.
All very well, but the thing that really surprised me about this suggests that either way we will be looking at ending all of this by May.
Okay, there are lots of gaps in this. The big gap between injections will probably mean the vaccination rate will effectively drop around March (the first group will need to get their second dose about that time). And I am assuming a very high effectiveness very quickly.
But the news that I take away is that we may only have 3 months to endure. That gives me hope. And when I think about the target of the vaccine roll out reducing hospitalisation I have a lot of hope.