Estimated Schedule
BC Public health has an official schedule, which they admit is out of date (as of 8 March 2021). Between it being out of date and — in my opinion, sandbagging quite a lot — I think their schedule is waaaay pessimistic.
I made a schedule based in part on the Canadian allocations page, information on SII/AZ buried in this article, information on additional Pfizer deliveries in this article, I made this chart, and some guesses, I made this estimation.
I think even this schedule is a little pessimistic.
I don’t have a good sense of when Moderna vax is going to arrive. Canada has contracts for 22M Moderna and 20M Pfizer (with options for 18M more), so you would think that they’d be shipping about as much as Pfizer, but I had to guess, so guessed low.
It doesn’t count J&J, AstraZeneca doses ordered directly from AZ, or AstraZeneca doses withdrawn from the COVAX store:I haven’t found information on how much is coming when. (I think even the government doesn’t know).
J&J and AZ are going to go to the parallel occupation-based vaccination track, so won’t be used in the clinics. They will decrease the number of people who need a vaccination at the age-based clinics, but I don’t know what the age distribution of the occupation-based clinics will be (aside from “not old enough to have retired”).
Updated 16 April 2021. I believe I had been too optimistic.
Ed note 22 June 2021. Wow, I was waaaaaay too pessimistic!
| Eligibility | Vax start date |
| 75+ years old or medically vulnerable | 29 March |
| 70+ | 5 April |
| 65+ | 12 April |
| 60+ | |
| 55+ | |
| 50+ | |
| 45+ | |
| 40+ | |
| 35+ | |
| 30+ | |
| 25+ | |
| everybody! |
Chart
This chart shows the number through the end of May of vaccines simultaneously with the sizes of the age cohorts (stacked). Note that the age lines assume that everybody in an age cohort will get vaccinated, which is not true. However, I do not know what the vaccine hesitancy rate is, let alone the hesitancy rate by age.
I made the mostly the same conservative assumptions about the supply as I did when making the chart: Moderna is slacking, and J&J and AZ are missing. I did include SII because I forgot to take them out, they are small, and they are at the top of the stack so you can just squint and ignore them.
Really, Moderna (in red) should be between 50% and 100% of Pfizer in this timeframe: we have contracted 20M doses of Pfizer (with an option for 18M more) and 22M from Moderna.
Logistics
There is a US CDC document Large-Scale Vaccination Clinic Output and Staffing Estimates: an Example which appears to date from the H1N1 outbreak (so from 2009) which gives an idea of what a mass vaccination clinic might look like.
I am hoping that, in this day and age, patients will sign up on the Web and get a bar code that they print out or take a photo of on their cellphone, so that when they get to the vax site, all the team needs to do is scan the barcode. That would cut out the position of Forms Distribution, Reviewer/Forms Helper, and Medical Records/Data Entry. Thus for their example of a four-vaccinator clinic, the number of support personnel would drop from 29 to 18-20.
The US CDC also says that one vaccinator can give 30 doses per hour. That’s 2 min per patient, and accounts for breaks and lunch and stuff, which means that to give all 4.2M adults in BC one dose, it will take 140,000 vaccinator-hours.