Sorry for the confusion but I have now undone an overly hasty correction. I “corrected” myself before double-checking, which was stupid. My original posting was correct – we are getting 18,000 DOSES of vaccine a week, not 18,000 vials of vaccine containing 5 or 10 doses each. So I’ve edited it a second time

I did a little back-of-envelope number crunching while listening to the weekly briefing about New Hampshire’s COVID-19 situation.

We’re getting a little less than 20,000 doses of vaccine a week via the feds. To get 70% of our 1.35 million residents inoculated (a “herd immunity” level) with two doses, it will take 95 weeks or a year and 10 months to finish the job, That assumes we can give out every single dose as soon as we get it – and so far, we’ve giving out about half. If we want “herd immunity” (90%) at this rate, it will continue into 2024.

This helps explain why only 4% of people in Phase 1-A – front-line workers and people living in hard-hit care facilities – have gotten two doses so far. About half have gotten one dose.

These are numbers we should keep in mind when anticipating when we’ll “get back to normal.”