COVID Vaccine Rollout

 As of April 15, 2021 about 25% of the population has been fully vaccinated. But, reports show that COVID infections are again on an uptrend in many States. On April 15th, Minnesota reported 2729 new cases and Wisconsin reported 1084. Minnesota has 552k cases and 7073 deaths and is starting to catch up to Wisconsin's 650k cases and 7412 deaths. The vaccine distribution has been fairly balanced with each State showing a vaccination rate that is within a few percent of each other (23% - 27%). At some point, the percent of people who want to be vaccinated will max out. I estimate that number will be around 60%, unless they make it mandatory or offer some kind of incentive to the people who are on the fence about getting the shot.

In the County where I live the population is around 150k. The number of COVID cases reported thus far is 15,865 and 117 deaths. That means roughly 1 in 10 residents have gotten sick and 1 in 135 have died from it. You could speculate that since 10% have recovered from it and 25% have been vaccinated that 35% of the population is safe. Unfortunately, experts say that you can get sick again after you have had it and you can also get sick after you get vaccinated. Although, second infections are relatively rare and getting sick after a vaccination is in the single digit percent range.

How soon can we stop wearing masks? I wouldn't expect to see States going back to a voluntary mask rule until the 7 day average for all States drops below 1000. Currently, we are at  70,000 new infections per day and rising. If vaccinations continue at the current rate and no vaccine resistant variants pop up, it will be at least another 6 to 9 months before we see the infection rate start trending to a level that would allow people to get back to normal. Going forward, it will be common to see people wearing masks in public in the US. In the past, it was only common to see this in foreign countries with large populations. Now that we know how fast a virus can spread, it will be years before we fully understand how this happened.