Let’s do some coronavirus math! This is a word problem, kids. I’m writing on January 14, 2021, and this post will be horribly outdated, but possibly of historical interest, when you read it.

The total number of cases confirmed to date as of today, in the U.S.: “23.1 million+” (New York Times)

The CDC’s ratio of actual cases to confirmed cases: 7.2 (CDC)

Number of cumulative cases in the U.S. so far: 23.1 million * 7.2 = 166 million (166,320,000)

Population of the United States: 328.2 million (Google)

% of our population that has had the coronavirus = 166 / 328.2 = 51%

% of our population that has been vaccinated: 3.1% (Financial Times)

But all other things being equal (which I am sure they are not), 51% of the people vaccinated will have already had the coronavirus, so the vaccine so far adds 1.6% to 51% of our population. Call it 53% to be generous.

We have heard a variety of estimates on what constitutes herd immunity, but the number 70% seems to be sticking at least in the media (I don’t have a source handy, and need to go do some other things now.) So we might not be that far off. The (painfully) slow but steady vaccine rollout tortoise will eventually get to the finish line, people are continuing to get infected at high rates every day in the meantime, and nobody wants to see another wave from the new variant, but if and when it hits us it might push us over the mark (at a horrific human cost, of course).

One last thought is that at the moment, I suspect we are immunizing people who are more likely to have already had an infection than the population as a whole. We are being told this is the most ethical approach, or the quickest way to lower risk for the population as a whole, or some combination of the two. The ethical statement may be true, although this seems subjective. I thought ethics was not up to ethicists, but rather ethicists were supposed to ascertain what our society as a whole considers ethical, and maybe compare that to other human societies past and present. I haven’t seen public polls of what people think is ethical, although they may exist. I can see a case that the way the vaccine is being rolled out is ethical, but I can also see a case for a random lottery being equally ethical.

Better planning and communication would not just be ethical, they are the common sense need and our government is continuing to fail, fail, fail and people are dying, which is the opposite of ethical governance. To my ears, it is arrogant to hear them lecturing us about ethics.