About 2% of the population is about 40% of the deaths as I understand it.
Unfortunately something like a million doses in the first stage are diverted to care home workers and NHS staff and thus do not contribute.
That figure is measured from the instant the injection occurs, within about ten days it's much better than that.
The other thing to note is that the rates of protection of getting the disease isn't the same as the rates of protection from getting it and going to hospital or getting it, going to hospital and then dying.
If the vaccine only gives you protection from catching the virus then if you get it your risk remains for going to hospital or dying.
However if it also reduces the severity of the illness (which appears to be the case with the Oxford vaccine, where there were no hospitalisations) then that reduces your risk of going to hospital and therefore your risk of dying.
As such we could see the death rates fall more than the previously suggested 600 to 500.
As an example, let's say that each vaccine halves your risk of contracting Covid-19 by 50% and then even if you catch it you are half as likely to die.
If we've vaccinated the people who make up a 1/3 of deaths and there's otherwise 600 deaths a day then that would then fall by 100 deaths as they don't catch the virus and then a further 50 deaths as those who catch it are then less likely to die. That's 1/4 less deaths at 450.
Now the group who make up the next third of deaths is then likely need more people to be vaccinated than the first group. However with the faster rate of vaccinating with more vaccines available it might not be all that much longer in duration. Let's say it takes us 4 weeks to get the 1 million high risk people vaccinated, it may only take 5 weeks to get the next 7 million done.
That could mean that by mid to late February we could see the numbers dying having been reduced by 1/2 of what it would otherwise have been with the same number of cases. If we are then doing second doses and getting rates of higher than 50% protection of infection and of not dying if infected, then the numbers could go fairly low fairly quickly.
If we get to 90% protection and 75% chance of not dying if infected then with the first third it would fall from 600 to 405 and with the second third it would fall to 210.
However with fewer people who are able to be infected then there's likely to be fewer people getting infected as there's less people able to pass it on (at least with the Oxford vaccine we know that there's low rates of measurable virus at the weekly tests).
