A useful rule of thumb for the vaccine is 10,000 dose-days : 1 life saved.
So if you hypothetically had a million doses of a vaccine sitting in the freezer, and you decided to keep them there for a week rather than injecting them, that's something like 700 lives.
So if you hypothetically had a million doses of a vaccine sitting in the freezer, and you decided to keep them there for a week rather than injecting them, that's something like 700 lives.
This is sensitive to, among other things, the progress of the vaccination campaign (dose-days save exponentially more lives early when they're being administered to seniors than when they're being administered to the general population), presumed infection rates, etc.
But some calculation like this is very useful to remind us that there is a cost to waiting, and the cost for waiting on this particular topic, at this particular moment, is so wildly disproportionate to the costs to waiting we typically endure as to stagger our imagination.
This also means that we should fight like hell for every dose-day, at every point in the supply chain, at every point in the patient experience, etc.
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