140k vaccinated in a week sounds good but that's roughly 7.3m a year. Prob need 30% or more of the pop, ie 20m to make a serious dent in the R with no restrictions. So obvs the vaccination program has to step up dramatically to make a difference sooner.
Looking at the Our World in Data case fatality rate by age, data for South Korea shows you have to get down to the 30-39 age group until the rate is similar to that for flu.
About 50 per cent of the UK population is 40 or over. So you need to vaccinate 33 million to get the case fatality rate of covid19 down to that for flu. I think that's right.
This doesn't account for the survivor disability from long covid, so there may be a motivation for holding restrictions of some sort until the risk of that is down to the comparable risk of other post respiratory disease disabilities. But it's in the ballpark.
Tidying up following a couple of the replies: the early part about vaccination and R implicitly assumes vaccination affects transmission. The latter part about equalizing the death risk to flu can be taken to imply vaccination does not affect transmission.
To explain: R measures the success with which the virus reproduces itself. If the vaccine doesn't stop transmission, it doesn't lower R, and therefore we can't stop socially distancing until the death risk faced by those succeptible falls to an acceptable level.
Second PS. I have used case fatality rates for flu and covid to get the ballpark figure. Really, infection fatality rates are what we want. I'm assuming that equalizing the cfr means equalizing the ifr. I think this means assuming detection of cases doesn't vary by age.
Third PS: case fatality rates for flu are low and uncertainty about them large relative to its level. This will translate into large uncertainties about the number of people you need to vaccinate to equalize the mortality risk between covid19 and flu.
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