Will we have to wait until everyone's received the 2nd vaccination?

[muminthesummer]

Started panicking about this today. Will we need the 2nd vaccination rolled out before we can start returning to some normality? Will DC be off school until then? Feeling a little bit on the edge.

No, we just need to wait until the pressure is relieved on the NHS. This should happen long before everyone gets their second jab.

What @Noellodee said. It is driven primarily by current and predicted pressure on the NHS, so informed by positivity rates and the age breakdown of positive tests.

No. What they said.

@Noellodee

No, we just need to wait until the pressure is relieved on the NHS. This should happen long before everyone gets their second jab.

What they said ⬆️

Hopefully within the next few weeks hospital admissions will start to decrease

Exactly what others have said... Once the deaths and hospitalisations are down I doubt we will hear much about case numbers as it will be irrelevant as long as the NHS is fine.

Once those deaths and hospitalisations are down to what the government consider an acceptable number (zero is just an unrealistic number, much like flu has an acceptable death rate) we can then return to normal....

What that magic number is is anyone's guess!

What we don't know yet is whether the schools being "closed" will be enough to bring R down, even before the added firebreak of the ever growing number of vaccinated people kicks in.

If it is not enough, then we will have a horrible period through January and much of February when cases continue to rise despite schools being closed, before the vaccinations and naturally gathered immunity start bringing cases down.

If it is enough, then cases will start decreasing within a couple of weeks, though this will not filter through to hospitals for another couple of weeks after that. We still won't be able to lift the brakes immediately even so, but it should mean it will be less time until we get to a point when we can start relaxing, because we will be bringing things down from a lower peak (lowER - not low) and should be able to get them down to manageable levels a lot faster.

We have to remember that whatever we see with the firebreaks we have now would be much more severe without them. It's not the case that lockdowns don't work, just that we never have anything to compare them against.

I'm really keeping my fingers crossed that we see cases coming down over the next couple of weeks. I just wish we'd kept the schools shut for that one extra day.

The point is that if we vaccinate the most vulnerable we are disconnecting the number of cases and R rate from the number of hospitalisations. As others have said, we are doing this to protect hospital capacity so if we decide to completely do away with precautions once the vulnerable are vaccinated Covid can spread safely through the population with only a low rate of hospitalisations. Like flu. Suspect we will see some limited precautions in place until everyone has had the second jab though (face masks and distancing at least).