You know the thing about seeing the light at the end of the tunnel?
Well, first and foremost, you have to realize that you’re still in a tunnel.
And sometimes, you can see that light from a very long way away.
But there’s a little sliver of that light right now.
More than 457,000 Canadians were vaccinated against COVID-19 last week, and 910,000 vaccine doses are scheduled to be received this week alone. And that’s before the huge ramp-up that should begin in April as firm Canadian deliveries arrive.
The federal government now expects to have 36.5 million doses of vaccines in hand by Canada Day, and the ability to give every Canadian at least their first shot.
The tunnel-light is equally bright in our neck of the woods.
This week, the Atlantic provinces are scheduled to receive 28,090 doses of the Pfizer vaccine (Newfoundland and Labrador, 5,850; P.E.I., 1,170; Nova Scotia, 11,700; and New Brunswick, 9,360). Two weeks from now, that number is forecast to more than double for a combined total of 74,830.
The federal government now expects to have 36.5 million doses of vaccines in hand by Canada Day, and the ability to give every Canadian at least their first shot.
Moderna makes deliveries every two weeks; the current schedule for Moderna doses has them also nearly doubling in the next batch for the Atlantic region from 26,300 this week to 51,300 by the week of March 22nd.
The first rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine is expected to bring 27,500 doses to the region.
Deliveries of a fourth approved vaccine, a one-dose vaccine from Johnson & Johnson, aren’t scheduled until next month.
Thanks to a public health policy change, those doses should go further than before — by spacing the time between the current vaccines’ two doses to four months, public health officials expect to give first doses to twice as many people. (Not everyone — including vaccine manufacturers — agrees that the delayed dose method is the right route to go.)
All of that means things are moving faster.
But here’s the sticky part.
Increased vaccine dose numbers are fantastic, and getting those doses into Canadians is even better — but right now, just 1.7 million Canadians have received at least their first dose, out of more than 37 million people.
If vaccine deliveries reach their targets, and if provincial and territorial health officers are correct in their predictions that they can handle those growing numbers of doses, by the end of June we should be one huge step closer to the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.
That doesn’t seem all that long, though it is a third again of the amount of time that we’ve already been dealing with this pandemic.
Meanwhile, we must contain using current methods of virus hygiene, from masks to frequent hand-washing to limiting social contacts, while we keep moving to the tunnel’s end.
