Show HN: TimetoHerd – Days left until 70% of your country is Covid-19 vaccinated | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: TimetoHerd – Days left until 70% of your country is Covid-19 vaccinated

timetoherd.com

32 points_griggs16 comments

Nicely done. Perhaps also add a pushstate so that someone will be able to link directly to a country?

Thanks! This is a good idea. I believe this is in the open issues on the github repo. I've been busy with work but would love for someone to take this on: https://github.com/pgriggs/timetoherd.com

Great work!

Not sure that I particularly agree with simplistic forumala to calculate % of population vaccinated. The literature [1] seems pretty clear that even a single dose of any of the vaccines is highly effective. The UK sitting at 17.4% vaccinated seems low with the number of daily deaths sitting at 1% of what they were prior to the vaccinations.

[1]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Thanks! This is a good point - the current calculation is a quick and dirty approach to clearly answer the question "at today's rate, how long would it take us to get X-percentage of the population fully vaccinated?". But it may be better to count one dose differently. Or show the current % of population with one dose if that data is available (which it is for some countries)

This is an overly simplistic calculation. They are only taking into account the current days vaccination rate instead of calculating the rate of change in vaccinations to extrapolate the future trend. The problem is that new vaccine production is increasing, and distribution channels are improving.

It also fails to include immunity for those who have had covid. While not a perfect measure, proven cases can be used to estimate a persons immunity duration as well as the number of people who had covid but were never diagnosed with covid.

The third variable to consider is the rate that vaccines will become available as some countries reach herd immunity. For example, the US is likely to reach herd immunity by summer based on the above information. Once that happens, more of the vaccine production will go to countries that are still working towards herd immunity.

With that said I would look at this as a worse case scenario for herd immunity and not as any kind of actual case scenario.

> While not a perfect measure, proven cases can be used to estimate a persons immunity duration as well as the number of people who had covid but were never diagnosed with covid.

I made a site that does exactly that: http://covid.mremington.co

To estimate true recovered infections from cases, I am using the heuristic defined here: https://covid19-projections.com/estimating-true-infections-r...

Based on T-cell studies, I assume natural immunity to be long lasting, though I may introduce another variable for immunity length.

this is true. It is overly simplistic by design and meant to only answer the question "at today's daily average vaccination rate, how long until x-percentage of the population is vaccinated?".

Maybe replace the number of days with an actual date.

It says almost 500 days for my country. But my country estimates to have 100% vaccinated by summer.

Far too pessimistic. It's likely not taking into account any acceleration.

Neat. Perhaps should take already infected people into account, this is a significant %. Also you could let the 70% be a slider, so people can play with their own herd immunity.

Not to mention some higher percentage threshold have been floated around as necessary for some of the more contagious variants of the virus.

Great work, thanks. Link to country would be a plus, also compare how two countries are doing. My place is worse than .. might give our politician a clue on how bad they are doing.

Thanks! This is a good idea. I have an open git issue for adding a table to compare all countries in the git repo https://github.com/pgriggs/timetoherd.com/.

It might be cool if you could select two countries from the table and compare.

Wouldn’t you also want to include cases in this calculation. Herd immunity would be close to (#cases + #vaccinations)/pop

This would be good, but is also not as simple as it sounds to do well. Most of the published vaccine data doesn't state whether the person vaccinated was previously infected with COVID. Additionally, the CDC recommends getting vaccinated even if you were previously infected.

There’s certainly overlap, but more accurate to use them towards counting toward herd immunity.

Recommendation is to get vaccine, but the site isn’t for vaccination, it’s for herd immunity.

So right now it’s really off because it’s missing ~20M people who count toward herd.

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