One good thing about today's press conference was that Boris announced that, from Monday, there will be daily statistics published on how many people have been vaccinated.
This will enable people to see the progress being made, and will leave the government nowhere to hide if there are problems or delays.
It will be rather like a cricket match where the batting side needs to score X runs per over to win, and currently they are scoring Y runs per over. If Y is greater than X, then it is likely that the batting side will win. But if X is greater than Y, and the gap between X and Y is getting larger, then the batting side will lose.
Similarly with the vaccine statistics.
Boris has said that they aim to vaccinate the 13.4 million people in the top 4 priority groups by 15th February. According to what he said today, 1.3 million has already been vaccinated, so that is 12.1 million in the next six weeks, so just over 2 million per week. At the moment we are not vaccinating anywhere near that number of people, so it doesn't look as if the target will be met. But you can estimate how many people will have been vaccinated by your target date, or how far past your target date it will take to vaccinate the required number of people.
It may be, for example, that if 75% of the target group of 13.4 million have been vaccinated by 15th February, the government will be in a position to consider easing restrictions, as those 75% will account for a sufficiently large proportion of expected COVID cases, hospitalisations and deaths.
But the government needs to monitor progress continuously, and have someone in charge who can "kick ass"so to speak, and remove red tape anything which prevents progress from being made.
This will enable people to see the progress being made, and will leave the government nowhere to hide if there are problems or delays.
It will be rather like a cricket match where the batting side needs to score X runs per over to win, and currently they are scoring Y runs per over. If Y is greater than X, then it is likely that the batting side will win. But if X is greater than Y, and the gap between X and Y is getting larger, then the batting side will lose.
Similarly with the vaccine statistics.
Boris has said that they aim to vaccinate the 13.4 million people in the top 4 priority groups by 15th February. According to what he said today, 1.3 million has already been vaccinated, so that is 12.1 million in the next six weeks, so just over 2 million per week. At the moment we are not vaccinating anywhere near that number of people, so it doesn't look as if the target will be met. But you can estimate how many people will have been vaccinated by your target date, or how far past your target date it will take to vaccinate the required number of people.
It may be, for example, that if 75% of the target group of 13.4 million have been vaccinated by 15th February, the government will be in a position to consider easing restrictions, as those 75% will account for a sufficiently large proportion of expected COVID cases, hospitalisations and deaths.
But the government needs to monitor progress continuously, and have someone in charge who can "kick ass"so to speak, and remove red tape anything which prevents progress from being made.