Today, the first person received the historic coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine in the United Kingdom.
But how long will it take to produce vaccines for 38 million Canadians?
Together with scientists from The Omni Calculator Project, physicists Steven Wooding and Domink Czernia, along with medical student Łucja Zaborowska, have created a tool that calculates how many vaccines per second need to be produced to reach herd immunity (70 per cent of the population) in any given country.
The calculator also allows you to do it another way, which estimates how many days, months, or years it will take to produce vaccines for a given population.
Wooding writes to Vancouver Is Awesome in an email that "Canada has ordered 40 million doses, but how long will it take Moderna to make them? That’s a bigger challenge."
Coronavirus (COVID-19) Vaccine Production Calculator
Canada's population is roguhly 37,742,000 people, and according to the calculator, 102 vaccines would need to be produced a minute in order to provide two doses to 70 per cent of the population in one year.
Follow these steps in order to try the tool yourself.
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Choose the population that you'd like to vaccinate
It can be a country, a continent, or the entire world! You may also choose the custom option and enter a number of your choice. (your county/city population, perhaps? 😉)
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Pick the percentage of people you'd like to vaccinate
Remember: for herd immunity to work, you need to vaccinate at least 70% of the population.
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Decide: how long will the production take?
or
- Choose how many vaccines you'd like to produce in a second/minute
View the calculator here.
