Amid this most recent lockdown, New Zealanders are considering vaccines as one important strategy to eliminate or reduce the impact of COVID-19.
To get a good sense of the quality of New Zealand’s vaccine roll-out, I compare our roll-out to peer countries. A few weeks ago, I was pretty pessimistic about New Zealand’s prospects. For the past couple of weeks, the data is starting to tell a different story.
Since the lockdown on August 17, there has been a sharp increase in the number of people in the country with a single jab. The rapid increase in vaccinations appears to match that of Canada once that country was able to obtain sufficient supply to vaccinate its population.
The visualizations include data for: Canada, New Zealand, Australia, United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Portugal. Each of the plots show how the vaccine roll-outs of the 7 nations compare. When there are no data provided, I show a gap in the series.
This second interactive plot shifts all of the countries to a common starting point. In this case, the bottom x-axis of the timeline is the number of days a country’s vaccine roll-out has been in operation. To compare each country’s vaccine roll-out, the common starting point is when the government has administered at least 30,000 COVID-19 vaccines to its population. I use this baseline as the starting point of all of the series because reaching this number accounts for the significant logistical work that must be put in place before delivering many vaccines.
There appears to be missing data for Australia and Singapore. The missing data has shifted those countries to the left in terms of their starting day.
New Zealand’s performance in the first 50 days is comparable to Canada’s when the country was also supply constrained. Both countries opted to prioritize vaccination of the most vulnerable people and indigenous people. When the Canadian government received vaccine supplies, its roll-out increased dramatically. The vaccination effort was made possible by making the vaccine broadly available from local doctors and pharmacists.
New Zealand’s Prime Minister has recently said that vaccines are no longer in short supply. I hope we will continue to see a rapid increase in vaccinations. We may see the same rapid increase for Australia as well.
One thing is clear the initial vaccine roll-out was very slow. The recent lockdown appears to have spurred the government to widen the distribution of vaccines to include pharmacies. (On a personal note, I was able to receive a jab quite recently once I switched my booking to a pharmacy.)
Let’s hope that New Zealand will continue the upward trend of first-dose vaccinations!
Have a comment? Let me know what you think.