According to Reuters, Bangladesh has administered at least 10,095,579 doses of Covid vaccines so far. Since these are Astra Zeneca vaccine shots, of which every person needs two doses, that number is adequate to have about 3.1% of the country’s population fully vaccinated.
The caveat on this number is that it is reported in terms of the number of doses administered and not the number of people vaccinated, fully or otherwise.
We can’t know from it how many people, or what percentage of the population, have been fully vaccinated in Bangladesh, ie, have received both doses of the vaccine (according to DGHS, some 5,820,015 people got the first dose and 4,290,964 of them got the second dose of the vaccine).
During the last week for which data is available, Bangladesh averaged about 2,526 doses administered each day. At that rate, it will take a further 12,908 days to administer enough doses for another 10% of the population.
That’s a worrying prospect, isn’t it? 12,908 days. More than 35 years, in other words. And that too, for just another 10%.
Of course, the vaccination effort will speed up. Already there are some supplies of vaccines that have been sourced from other vendors than Astra Zeneca and other countries than the sorely-suffering India.
But how quickly can we source an adequate number of vaccines to fully vaccinate the majority of our population? Because, make no mistake about it, there is no other solution to the crisis we find ourselves in at this point.
Which brings us to the other part of this issue: Exactly how many people do we have to vaccinate before we can be assured of having the coronavirus situation under control in this country?
According to WHO, "The percentage of people who need to be immune in order to achieve herd immunity varies with each disease. For example, herd immunity against measles requires about 95% of a population to be vaccinated.
"The remaining 5% will be protected by the fact that measles will not spread among those who are vaccinated. For polio, the threshold is about 80%. The proportion of the population that must be vaccinated against Covid-19 to begin inducing herd immunity is not known. This is an important area of research and will likely vary according to the community, the vaccine, the populations prioritized for vaccination, and other factors."
In other words, the vast majority of our population will have to be fully vaccinated before we have this pandemic under any kind of control. In yet other words, we have the devil’s own task ahead of us.
Those of us in the privileged class who have been lucky enough to have received our shots, who put up photos on social media with our biceps exposed and two of our fingers raised in victory, who thanked the powers that be and our lucky stars for our unexpected good fortune, were possibly unaware of what a cocoon we were living in.
The initial spate of vaccinations served its purpose. The chattering classes stopped their chattering. The corporation given the responsibility of procuring the vaccines made its money.
But the fact is, we haven’t even scratched the surface of the task at hand and the task is very daunting indeed.
And unless we get deadly serious about it in double time, we shall be caught in these cycles of stops and starts while unconscionable numbers of our fellow citizens suffer and die from this blight.
We shall still be having lockdowns; partial, complete or of any other variety in-between, while other countries open their economies and borders, go back to some semblance of normal life and forge ahead.
I hope some people in positions of power are listening.
Tanvir Haider Chaudhury has spent most of his career as a banker and is now running a food and beverage company.
