Jonathan Van Tam was saying on the TV news tonight that if we vaccinate the most vulnerable people, he thinks we could get rid of 99% of the hospitalisations and deaths from COVID-19.
Even if it doesn't turn out to be 99%, then a large decrease in hospitalisations and death will mean that COVID-19 is no worse than seasonal flu, and something approaching a normal life can then resume.
I think the requirement to continue self isolating after vaccination is only until the scientists understand the effect of vaccination on transmission of the virus, or until sufficiently large numbers of people have been vaccinated.
What he said was that they are targeting groups of people for vaccination in phase 1 where those groups contain 99% of the hospitalisations and deaths from COVID-19. That does not mean a 99% reduction in serious cases is expected...
There is no data on the effectiveness of covid vaccines in older people with underlying health conditions. Data for other vaccines show varying degrees of lower effectiveness levels in in older people with underlying health conditions.
If you target the 99% groups with a vaccine that is 95.1% efficient (+0.1/-0.6%) you get a 94.1% reduction not a 99% reduction (i.e. 0.99*0.951).
6% with no restrictions or mitigation in place level of transmission is probably manageable for the NHS but still has some big impacts on their ability to do deal with non covid workloads.
If the vaccine is less effective in those high risk groups then the reduction in case numbers will be lower.
Not all of those ~24-25m in the priority groups are able to have the vaccine, recent estimates put that number at 1.2m (or 5% of that group).
Hence 0.99*(1-0.05)*0.951 = 89.4% this assume the vaccine effectiveness is 95.1% in that group and all those that can be vaccinated take it. 10.6% of a no restrictions / mitigation serious case level is a problem for the NHS.
They also only have enough of the Pfzier vaccine by the end of 2021 for 20m of those 24-25m. So they need the Oxford/AZ and Moderna vaccines.
Hence the reality is that the reduction will be lower than the 89.4% above.
It will take many months to get data on transmission rate reduction and transmission rate reduction is a key part of those who can't have the vaccine or for whom it isn't effective. These will be a very interesting and import set of numbers!
I hope this isn't true. It seems whatever happens some people want to keep restrictions in place as something might happen. You really would think this is the most deadly virus ever.
There is very limited data on the effect of the vaccines on infectiousness /transmission. Pfizer and Moderna have't tried to collect data and the UK arm of the Oxford AZ trial did but there is no public analysis of that data yet.
As Boris said yesterday he wished he had had a better understanding of asymptomatic transmission far earlier. Asymptomic transmission of Covid is far worse than for SARS / MERS (for both of which peak infectiousness starts 2 days after starting to show symptoms, unlike Covid which appears to start 1.5-2 days before if you show symptoms) or Flu which is one of the reason dealing with Covid is so hard.
A person offered the vaccine should be considered equivalent to a person receiving the vaccine for the purposes of deciding when restrictions are released.
If an over 65 year old decides not to be vaccinated, that is there decision, but the rest of the country should not be held ransom to them.
If they catch it they catch it and if they die they die, society will have discharged their responsibility to them at that point.
Unfortunately for your thinking the government is banking on some level of transmission rate reduction to protect the 1.2m who can't be vaccinated in the priority group or those for whom vaccination is ineffective. The maths needs people vaccinated even if you don't like this!
If there are useful levels of transmission rate reductions measured then they will be looking to vaccinate 85%+ of the adult population. (Transmission rate reductions are almost always lower than the measured vaccine effectiveness)
This is what I feared might happen. For most of the year we have been told that restrictions will be around until we can start to vaccinate. Then when the vaccine arrives, the experts suddenly start to dial back and tell us vaccines aren't the be all & end all.
It was always clear to me a fair number of others that you need quite a large number of people vaccinated to start seeing effects and there are lots of time lags too e.g. the measured effectiveness in 2 weeks post second dose, several months to vaccinate the high risk groups if they have enough vaccine. Again always clear to me a number of others that the reality wasn't going to be as magically quick as some were spinning.
It is also worth remembering that the weather will be against us till at least April. The winter : summer case prevalence ratio in the 4 traditionally circulating human coronaviruses is 9:1, hence if Covid is similar you would need more restrictions in winter than summer to achieve the same transmission levels.
While people might want the restrictions lifting ASAP, the maths ins't pointing to that.