This was Tweeted Dec 23 at 12:18pm (my time zone). The number of vaccinations is even higher by the time you read this post.
I believe the number. It’s just hard to wrap my head around 1 million syringes stacked up in a football stadium.
A nurse could average maybe 12 vaccinations an hour? You have to process people, get the forms signed, grab a vial and syringe, roll up your sleeve etc. Administering a shot every 5 mins would be very tiring for any nurse.
Does this number make sense to you? They say it’ll take until summer to finish vaccinations? At this pace?
I remember, during my 1960s childhood, a needle-less, compressed air “vaccine gun”.
It had a large glass jar at the bottom, kinda like a coffeepot. And an air house.
And they lined us kids up & measle4s-vaccinated the bunch of us, production line style.
Might not be too safe today, but it happened.
Chicago public schools, in the 60s.
There was a thread on exactly this recently. Jet injectors are still in use for mass vaccinations in some places, but their use isn’t nearly as widespread as it used to be. The U.S. military stopped using them in 1997, and few if any U.S. school districts use them anymore. The dangers of cross-contamination are just too high.
Also, the bottlenecks with the Moderna and even moreso with the Pfizer vaccines are production, transportation, and on-site storage. The time the actual physical inoculation procedure takes isn’t really a significant bottleneck.
Given that I know at least two people personally, I think that’s likely. (Both are medical professionals). My sister and her husband would get it next week - but both had Covid at the beginning of December so are now at the bottom of the health care worker list for their hospital - and the only reason their hospital is later is that they are rural and will use the Moderna vaccine due to storage requirements.
At that rate, it would take about 9 years to vaccinate everyone in the country. So we’re actually going to have to vaccinate people at a much faster rate than that once we get this thing going.
The article makes clear that that the Pentagon policy is based on the fact that at the moment the FDA has only issued an Emergency Use Authorization, not a full authorization. Plus, the military doesn’t actually have enough to vaccinate everyone, anyway. The quoted officials said that if the FDA issues a full authorization, it will quite possibly become mandatory.
From my personal experience, I’d bet it will be made mandatory for personnel who are deployed or preparing for deployment, but not necessarily for personnel in garrison (or the service equivalent).
One nurse doesn’t interact with one patient. There’s an assembly line. The person who jabs you does one every 30 seconds, not one every 5 minutes. Since paperwork takes much longer than 30 seconds (WAG 5 minutes) they’ll have 10 paperwork helpers feeding 10 customers to each jabber. And each jabber has somebody acting as a syringe filler & used syringe disposer. None of those other people need any medical skill or licensing.
Have you ever eaten at Chipotle or Qdoba? They can custom make a complete burrito once every 15 seconds. It takes 6 people to do it assembly line style, but if each one made their burrito from start to finish it’s take more like 2 minutes per burrito. Not 15 seconds. That’s an 8x speedup.
Mass production. It was a neat invention of the 1800s that more people should learn about.
It’s been fifty years since my elementary school vaccinations.
I get the flu shot at Kroger. Takes about 10 mins unless there’s people waiting. There’s no urgency or rush. The staff treats it the same as checking out groceries.
I see your point that they can easily setup a assembly line to jab a bunch of people quickly. This will be my first experience with it. I hope they gave me a lollipop afterwards.
My CVS experience was something different entirely. It probably took me half an hour but they were very busy with other things. I envision big vaccination tents in the parking lot with previous appointments made on the internet starting in the Spring. No guarantees of lollies though.
Current US population is 331 million. I’ve read maybe 60% to 70% will get vaccinations. Pregnant women are currently excluded. But I assume they can get it after giving birth.
If we assume 70% get vaccinated, since that’s the more difficult task, 70% of 331 million is 232 million. In 10 days we’ve gotten 1/232 of the way through.
1/232 is the equivalent of 3 cups in a 5 gallon bucket. Or about 1-1/4 cups in a 2 gallon bucket. Far more than “a drop”.
At that rate it will take 6+ years to get everyone. But nobody expects us to stay at this slow rate for the duration. The gears are just barely getting moving.
