Today’s brief summary requires nothing more than a brief look at the vaccination graph I’ve posted below the usual charts. And if this were being presented as a brief summary in some boardroom somewhere, there would be some hushed whispers. “Hey… what’s the deal with the blue line?”
We’ll get to it.
This is a graph of smoothed-out daily data of the number of people being vaccinated by region, normalized to a number per million.
If you look at the tail-end of the graph, which is from the last day or two, you can see the thick red Canada line somewhere near 7,500… which means, on a daily basis, 7,500 out of a million Canadians are being vaccinated. That number was 4,500 a month ago.
In fact, here’s a look across the country of rough seven-day averages:
BC, a month ago: 4,600. Today: 7,100
AB, a month ago: 3,700. Today: 7,300
SK, a month ago: 3,600. Today: 6,000
MB, a month ago: 3,000. Today: 8,800
ON, a month ago: 4,700. Today: 7,600
QC, a month ago: 5,200. Today: 7,400
Across the board – very good. Vaccination programs across the country gearing up and/or delivering at increasingly-effective rates.
Now, let’s look at that thick blue line… our neighbours to the south. That’s the line that seems to be going in the wrong direction, opposite to all the others.
US, a month ago: 5,300. Today: 3,700
The irony of course is that the U.S. is comparatively drowning in vaccine… but demand is waning. This is the pattern that took them to a 43% vaccination rate, but the next 43%… well, it’ll be beyond difficult. It may actually be impossible.
Forget all of the complicated supply/demand market elasticity theories you may have come across. All of it is irrelevant. If this were a business, the boardroom presentation would be a PowerPoint full of lousy explanations and poor excuses… because the fundamental value proposition is gone. The business model is going to fail, because, as good as the product may be, demand is drying up. R&D department? They did what they were asked and delivered beautifully. Legal? Check. Logistics and distribution? Check. Marketing? Ouch.
It still boggles the mind. This is the part that I and many others simply didn’t see coming. That, after creating, in record time, what’s arguably one of the greatest achievements ever in medical science, an awful lot of people simply don’t want it. A massive failure, arguably due to nothing more than awful, irresponsible, criminally negligent messaging. The marketing department responsible got fired in November and the new team took over in January… but as hard as they’re trying to fix the damage, it may be too late.
Brutal. Meeting adjourned.
Good grief… and to think the EU are in talks with the US about European summer vacations for Americans… imo everyone still needs to take a big breath and wait until we have at least 65% fully vaccinated/immune worldwide, and that’s going to take a lot longer than the next couple months… humans….sigh 🙁
a fellow named Youyang Gu has a Path to ‘Normality’ forecast which sees the US leveling out with a total immunity of 62%.
It’s just kinda depressing that we’ll get so close, but still wind up with an R0>1.
Horatio Kemeny – where are you getting your ON case numbers from? The number today is 3,871 according to https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/coronavirus-covid19-canada-world-april29-2021-1.6006757
With more states opening up, attending baseball games and UFC fights, despite things seemingly holding steady, this was to be expected. The incentive is too far diminished.
Ha ha, love it.
“The marketing department responsible got fired in November and the new team took over in January…”
Short term – more for the rest of us. A good Scots tradition of taking advantage of the slow.
The USA hospitalizations are creeping upwards as an echo of past infection rates but may be indicatìve that an economic demographic isn’t participating in their vaccination program.