How soon do you think we'll be seeing this in falling death rates? My Mum, 82, has been told January for hers. My Father in law, 87 had his first dose last week
The decisions are not made from clinical need but ease of access with this tricky vaccine.
Once we have the Oxford vaccine it will be done on vulnerability and age in the tiers they have created.
My friend who has to wait to January could not be more vulnerable - older than either the above - with very severe asthma, a son who died around 30 from asthma, in heart failure for over a year and having spent last Christmas in hospital with sepsis and pneumonia that she beat.
So if it was just priority of need she would have been in the first 800,000 I am certain.
As for when we will see death rates fall. Hopefully by mid January it will start as the transition from catching it to dying is at least 4 weeks or so on average. So by the end of January there ought to be a visible difference but it will be offset by all the other factors - rising cases potentially increasing hospital pressures, deaths from other things that are common in winter but will likely get put down to Covid.
Going to depend on many things - not least how well one dose does protect.
Watching the death figures in coming weeks will tell us a lot. But it is not a simple equation to work out as multiple factors 'cause' what is reported as a 'Covid death'.
We should first notice something in care home deaths once they are mostly protected. As these are inevitably major places where the over 80s catch it. And staff are in this first wave of vaccinations and that should have an impact too.
