Canadians Awaiting Rescue

"It's going to be extremely profound to see those groups immunized, plus those people who have taken care of them."

"That's a big amount that's actually taken off the table. That essentially makes this much more of a manageable disease."

"There is an end to these restrictions. There's an end to this lifestyle, so holding on for longer just gives us time to get that vaccination out there."

"There's going to be a point where you cross where that risk starts settling down to something that's very tolerable."

Dr.Zain Chagla, infectious disease physician, professor, McMaster University, Hamilton 

"By protecting those in long-term care, and reducing the rate of infection in long-term care, you also have significant positive ripple effects in the general community."

"If you just have fewer people in long-term care sick with this infection, that will result in fewer people being transferred to hospitals."

"It's not going to be like a light switch. I don't think it's going to be one day they're going to say, 'OK, it's back to normal'."

"It's not going to be like summer of 2019. But it'll certainly be closer to summer of 2019 than summer of 2020."

Dr.Isaac Bogoch, infectious disease physician, member Ontario Task Force for the Rollout

 

The global community is in a hiatus period, waiting for rescue from the confines of a huge concentration camp that places firm strictures on the way we live, making near-recluses of us, hampering our freedoms so long taken for granted, giving us breathing room but just barely where some peoples' lives have been so afflicted with the worst excesses that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is capable of producing that their mental balance hovers on the edge of managing to cope, but barely.

But the first approved vaccines against COVID-19 are now in circulation, and governments are arranging for the most vulnerable among their populations to receive the initial doses, relieving them of the dangers that have ended the lives of so many others in those vulnerable groups. A just-in-time solution to a raging pandemic whose predations are nowhere near finished even as the frantic race to immunize as many people as possible trudges on. Rescue is there, somewhere on the tip of the horizon.

Research through the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention certified that people over age 85 risk death from COVID-19 -- 630 times greater than anyone aged between 18 and 29. Roughly 70 percent of the virus death toll in Canada struck those over 80. The Canadian government has expectations of receiving four million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, available for injection into the arms of Canadians by the end of March. An additional two million doses of Moderna's vaccine is anticipated within the same time frame.

 

The provinces are behind targets of getting COVID-19 vaccine into Canadians' arms, and experts say logistical challenges are largely to blame but are hopeful the arrival of the Moderna vaccine will help speed things up.

 

But Canada's population is around 38 million people, and would need at the very least 74 million doses to ensure that the entire population could be vaccinated. Even if only 60 percent vaccination occurs, it should guarantee herd immunity, protecting that portion of the population for whom vaccinations are not recommended, or who refuse to be vaccinated, unwilling to place their trust in a new vaccine using a new bio-engineering technology that was produced in record-short time.

Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccinations use similar cutting-edge biomedical techniques. And both require two doses be applied for full efficacy in which case with the incoming vaccines no more than three million people in Canada could be fully immunized by the end of March. April is forecasted as the soonest the vaccine will be available on a more widespread basis. As for the entire population to be immunized, the time frame stretches to the fall of 2021.

In the United States estimates projected by both the outgoing and the incoming administrations see the potential for a full third of the entire American population to be vaccinated by spring. Placing the U.S. well ahead of Canada. Most of the at-risk population is set to be vaccinated by March or April, in the United Kingdom. The estimate for Canada is for eight percent to be vaccinated in the first quarter of the year. Experts appear to agree, however, that the target population being vaccinated has a huge potential to alter the impact of the virus.

Generally speaking, immunizations are recommended for long-term care residents and workers, front-line hospital staff and Canadians over 80 to receive the first vaccine arrivals. To the present in Canada, about 100 deaths occur daily, a number anticipated to fall once the initial vaccinations have been completed. About 1.7 million Canadians are aged over 80, according to Statistics Canada. The 2015 census found 224,000 people live in long-term care or nursing homes, with an additional 127,000 housed in retirement residences of some kind.

It is estimated that the first three million doses should represent enough vaccine to inoculate most of the people in those three categories. Over a third of the COVID cases requiring hospitalization have been among people over age 80, and over half are over the age of 70, groups represented in the targeted rollout. Confirmed orders to date are expected to vaccinate 30 million Canadians with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

AstraZeneca's vaccine was approved this week by Britain, along with Oxford University's homegrown U.K. vaccine requiring a booster after 12 weeks. A single-dose vaccine is expected from Johnson and Johnson, 38 million doses of which has also been ordered by Canada, with early trials showing an immune response in 98 percent of vaccine recipients. 

 

Dr.Bogoch pointed out that the summer of 2020 held a steady increase in infections concentrated among a younger cohort with few hospitalizations. And the summer of 2021 promises to be vastly different than its counterpart of a year earlier.

So yes, Virginia, Santa visited you last month and he probably confided in you that there is indeed 'light at the end of the tunnel'. Did you tell your mother to share the good news?

Countries around the world have started vaccination campaigns