COVID vaccination in India: are we on track?
Last week, all of a sudden, perhaps out of restlessness, I ended up making a video about the ongoing COVID vaccination trend in India, thinking of it as something I should share with my friends. Here is the link if the reader is interested. Though the audio language of the video is Bangla, the content and the context, I feel, are self-explanatory. English subtitles are also available for the video if the CC option is enabled.
I received some very valuable feedback on that video. This week, in this story, I’ll try to incorporate those feedback for a more realistic analysis of the situation.
First, let’s see the latest count of people vaccinated until the 4th June 2021 with at least the first dose and it is 17,91,72,948 i.e., about 18 crore.
Let’s add a Manhattan plot like we see in cricket showing daily vaccination counts. Here we can see a very close series of skyscrapers on the right which is very promising.
As far as the vaccination target is concerned, in my last week’s video, I roughly considered the target population to be 130 crore. However, we need to revise the number to a more practical one. Based on latest Indian demographic information available online, we will now consider that out of whole 136 crore population, about 26% are below the age of 15. So, with these figures, let’s revise the target to 74% of 136 crore that is roughly 100 crore. This will also serve the purpose of achieving “herd immunity.”
For making projection, instead of using the trendline feature, we’ll rather follow a more optimistic model. It’s visible from the Figure 2 Manhattan that the rate of vaccination has become pretty consistent as well as picked up a reasonable amount of speed lately. Hence, we’ll consider the current vaccination rate, let’s call it CVR, as the average of vaccination achieved in last 10 days and that number comes to be 25,66,157.
The target date, however, still remains the 31st December 2021 and we’re still not taking the second dose scenario into consideration. We also won’t be using polynomial of any higher order so that we can visualize the projection with simplicity almost like a cricket match analysis.
Now let’s try to make a projection of the trend with the above information.
As we can see with the revised target of 100 crore in remaining 210 days, the required vaccination rate, let’s call it RVR, comes around 39,31,919 per day as of now whereas the CVR is near about 25 lakh, which is still low with respect to the target. With this rate we’ll only reach around 71,80,65,897 by the target date.
Now, let’s use the trendline on the current projection line to see when we may reach this target with the CVR and the date comes as mid of April 2022 provided the rate does not decrease.
I am extremely hopeful that the rate will rather increase with time and it won’t be that late.
Another very valuable remark I received is that administering vaccine at the required rate is not a problem at all provided there is enough supply. I completely agree with this. Not only out of confidence but from first-hand accounts. However, analysis on vaccine procurement and distribution is not possible at this moment and we can do analysis on the data available on vaccination only.
Let’s hope the vaccination drive reaches the required rate soon enough.
Thanks for reading. I would be happy to know your valuable thoughts or suggestions on this analysis.
