When will the first Covid-19 vaccination campaign end?

The short answer is September, if everything continues according to the current trend and according to forecasts. The completion of the vaccination round will not put an end to Covid-19, but it is an important milestone for the exit from the health emergency

(photo: Eugene Chystiakov / Unsplash) The vaccination campaign, as now evident from progress of the official data recorded daily, has gained momentum with the spring and is continuing at a high speed even in these first days of summer. Although some media and politicians have expressed concern about a possible decline in the rhythm of the most typically holiday months - July and August - at the moment, official information refers to a possible very limited decline, in the order of just a few percent.

This allows, trusting that the next few weeks will not reserve us other surprises and unexpected events, to start thinking about when the first Italian vaccination campaign will end.

The necessary premise is that the end of the first round of administrations will not sanction the end of the pandemic or the circulation of the Sars-Cov-2 coronavirus. On the one hand, in fact, the need to subject people to further booster vaccinations is already more than mentioned (at a time interval yet to be established, but which could ensure that the first vaccinated people receive the third dose by 2021) , and on the other hand, the circulation of various viral variants makes it at least plausible that it will be necessary to protect people with specially adapted and updated formulations. However, the completion of the campaign is by no means a secondary goal, both symbolically and substantially, as having a very large majority of vaccinated people will hopefully help to greatly reduce the number of symptomatic and severe cases of the disease.

What does the end of the vaccination campaign mean

Of course, the vaccination campaign will not end when 100% of the covered Italian population is reached. First of all, to date only people aged 12 and over can be vaccinated, which means removing about 6 million people from the 60 million Italians, bringing the total to be reached to 54 million. Furthermore, given that it is unlikely that all eligible people are actually vaccinated (we have people who cannot receive the vaccine, people who do not want to get vaccinated, etc.), a conventional threshold is usually set that determines the campaign's dissemination goal. This threshold could theoretically coincide with that of herd immunity - which in turn depends on the specific pathogen - but in the case of Covid-19 for Italy it has been arbitrarily decided to set this percentage at 80%.

It was therefore assumed, by hypothesis, that it will be difficult to intercept more than 4 out of 5 entitled persons with vaccination. And, in quantitative terms, the objective of the campaign is to reach just over 43 million people covered . It goes without saying that if higher percentages were reached it would be an even more encouraging result, but still the 43 million are what - in the media and in institutions - we refer to when we talk about the end of the campaign.

When we will finish, looking at the doses

Two possible factors can be the bottleneck for the conclusion of the vaccination campaign: the availability of doses to be administered, and the speed of administration. Let's go in order.

To date Italy has received a total of just over 50 million doses, of which it has administered just over 47. If all people were vaccinated with a double dose, we would need of 86 million doses overall, even if the nearly 2 million single-dose Janssen administered bring down the count to 84 million: 41 million with double dose and 2 with single dose. Therefore, 34 million doses are still missing from the appeal to end the campaign.

Of these, according to what was communicated yesterday by the commissioner structure led by General Francesco Figliuolo, 14.5 million doses will arrive during the month in July, of which 12.1 from Pfizer and 2.4 from Moderna. These figures, which correspond to a decline of 0.8 million doses (5%) compared to the 15.3 million delivered in June, indicated that by early August we expect approximately 20 million doses to be missing when the campaign is completed. And this in a slightly pessimistic hypothesis, because it does not take into account the Janssen administrations nor does it include those who, after receiving a first AstraZeneca dose, will opt to continue with the homologous vaccination without switching to messenger AR formulations.

Also if at the moment there are no reliable data for the months from August onwards, the general trend suggests that the target in terms of delivered doses can be reached at some point in September, perhaps even in the first part of the month. To this should be added the time gap that has existed since the beginning of the campaign between the delivery of the doses and the actual administration: a gap that today is in the order of 3 million doses, that is roughly a week.

When we will finish, looking at the administrations

An evaluation with a totally different approach can instead be made on the basis of the administration rate, assuming that the availability of doses is not a problem. A first rough estimate, based on the average data of the last month, is that just over 500,000 doses of the vaccine can be injected per day. Still to be administered are approximately 37 million doses (84 million target minus 47 already injected), which would correspond to 74 days of administration. If we count from today, June 24th, we would arrive at the first days of September, the 6th to be precise.

This estimate has an element of optimism and one of pessimism. The first is that there is no decline due to the summer holidays, and therefore the pace is not affected by a slowdown even in the central weeks of August when most of our country will be on vacation. The one of pessimism, on the other hand, is that the general acceleration trend that has been continuing almost without exception from February to today is interrupted. In mid-March the daily administrations were almost 200 thousand, in mid-April almost 300 thousand, in mid-May 480 thousand and in mid-June 550 thousand: if the trend were to continue, in mid-July we could be over 600 thousand, anticipating the goal between the end of August and the beginning of September. .

Beyond the end of the campaign

All the evaluations proposed so far start from the hypothesis that 20% of the vaccinable audience that does not fall within the objective do not participate at all in the vaccination campaign. If instead there was - as to be hoped - a higher adhesion, then the goal would be reached with a little delay, because we would have a higher percentage of 80% of first doses before reaching 80% of second doses. .

Looking a little further in time, the possible scenarios become more uncertain. If, instead of reaching 80%, we were aiming for 90%, we would have to add about ten million administrations and therefore another 3 weeks or so. And if it were then decided to proceed seamlessly with the third doses, at that point, neither the number of doses nor the speed of administration would act as the bottleneck, but having to wait for the last vaccinated to pass the lapse. of adequate time between second and third dose.


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Coronavirus Health Coronavirus Vaccine Modern Vaccine Pfizer BioNTech Vaccine globalData.fldTopic = "Coronavirus, Health, Coronavirus Vaccine, Modern Vaccine, Pfizer BioNTech Vaccine"

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