The UK’s coronavirus vaccination programme passed a milestone this week, with 10m first doses administered. The rate of jabs is averaging more than 400,000 a day and the government is on course to meet its target of giving first doses to the 15 million most vulnerable people by mid-February.
But scientists say that unprecedented vaccine coverage and staged unlocking at the right time are crucial to avoid a devastating resurgence. So, season by season, how might 2020 look?
Winter
The urgent task over the winter is to vaccinate the 15 million people in the top four priority groups, drawn up by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI): care home residents, frontline health and social care workers, the clinically extremely vulnerable and the over-70s.
The UK has decided to delay booster shots for up to three months, but the JCVI is monitoring Public Health England (PHE) data weekly: if there are signs protection is waning from first shots, boosters could be given sooner. Most deaths, 88%, occur in these top four groups, so vaccination should reduce fatalities substantially. Because it takes three weeks for immunity to build after a shot, and because of the lag between people becoming infected and dying, the impact of jabs on deaths will take time to show in official figures – it should be visible from the end of February.
“We will be nowhere near seeing the full effect on the day we vaccinate the last person in that group. It will become more and more apparent in the weeks after,” says Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Edinburgh University.
But there are pitfalls to watch out for, he says. Amid the rush to vaccinate, there is a danger substantial numbers of vulnerable people miss out. When lockdown lifts, the virus will still be around, putting those people in danger of hospitalisation and death. “I am very concerned that in the rush to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible we leave people behind, and the people that get left behind will tend to be from minority ethnic groups and deprived areas and they tend to be most at risk from this disease,” Woolhouse says. “We need to be really ambitious, to break records with vaccine coverage, and not move on before we finish the job.”
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