Summary: The weeks-long delay in administering millions of distributed vaccines will cost thousands of lives.
How many people will die because we are slow to get out the vaccine? The majority of distributed vaccines have still not been administered. As of today, January 13, the CDC reports about 9 million people have been vaccinated, about one-third of the more than 27 million doses distributed. In long-term care facilities, fewer than 1 million doses have been given, out of more than 4 million distributed. Meanwhile, daily deaths from COVID-19 in the United States are averaging over 3,000 per day.
In this post, I provide a simple estimate of the lives that will be lost by these vaccine delays. The approach is to count the number of delayed doses and multiply this by the number of days of delay and the mortality rate per day of people who have missed out on getting the vaccine.
- The number of delayed doses is on the order of 18 million, which we can disaggregate between the long-term care program delays (about 3 million) and the general population (about 15 million.)
- It’s not clear exactly what the average delay has been. It is now mid-January. The federal government’s announced goal was 20 million doses by the end of 2020. By January 1, more than 14 million doses had been delivered but fewer than 2.8 million had been administered. It appears that the delays number in weeks, not days, and that 2 weeks might be a good characterization.
- The current daily death rate from COVID-19 for the general population is more than 1 per 100 thousand, based on dividing the daily county of deaths by the national population size (3,000 deaths per day among a population greater than 300 million).
The implication of these rates for the general population is that 14 days of delay of 18 million doses will lead to an estimated 2,500 deaths that could have been saved by the vaccine.
But the actual situation is worse, because the vaccines that have been delayed would not have been administered randomly among the population but rather targeted at high-risk populations experiencing elevated death rates.
A separate calculation just for the long-term care population can be made based on age. The average age of those in long-term care is about 75, an age at which the death rate is about 10 times that of the population average. Thus, the death rate per day of not being vaccinated is close to 1 in 10,000. When I multiply this by the 3 million doses that are delayed in long-term care, the estimated death-toll of delays rises to about 4,200 lives.
The above calculations are not meant to be exact. Rather they are intended to give a sense of the magnitude. Suggestions and criticisms are welcome. Perhaps the delays are shorter than they appear due to under-reporting of administered vaccines. Perhaps the vaccinations would not have been 100% successful in reducing mortality among those who received the doses. On the other hand, these estimates are conservative in that they only account for the direct effect of vaccination on the mortality of those receiving the shots, and do not include the lost opportunity to reduce the spread of the coronavirus through vaccination.
It seems clear that the delays we have seen so far are likely to lead to the deaths of thousands of people. Every day counts. We are trying, but we need to try harder.