Called the Vaccine Queue Calculator, which is accessible for ten days on the Omni Calculator site, this tool is based on statistical and health institutions such as the Haute Autorité de santé, Santé Publique France, the Insee and the CovidTracker.fr website.
This tool gives you a (wide) range of waiting time before accessing the vaccine at the risk of not taking into account a very fluid vaccination schedule.
In this tense context, two researchers have developed a calculator, free to access on the Internet, supposed to estimate the waiting time, in several countries, to be vaccinated against Covid-19.
“We figured there were plenty of people out there who had to be asking this question. Specialized in the development of calculators, we wanted to facilitate these people’s work by offering them an answer according to the data of their country”. It is explained by one of the tool’s creators, Salam Mubarak, doctor Of the National Institute of Applied Sciences (NIAS) of Villeurbanne near Lyon and now located in Dubai.
With his Polish colleague Maciej Kowalski, this robotics engineer was inspired by a similar simulator of a British physicist with whom they collaborate in the start-up Omni Calculator. “He conceived it during the vaccination campaign in England. In a few weeks, the page has been viewed more than 15 million times!” Adds the scientist who has since developed the same type of calculator for around ten countries.
Dubbed the “Vaccination queue calculator” and accessible for ten days on the Omni Calculator site, this tool is based on statistical and health institutions such as the Haute Autorité de santé, Santé Publique France, the Insee and the CovidTracker.fr website.
The whole question is whether it is reliable when the vaccination schedule, which is prioritized by age and profession, is also subject to unpredictable variables, such as the actual availability of vaccine doses or a delay in vaccine delivery. ‘authorization for this or that serum.
“The software asks you for your age, which is the most impacting factor:-
- if you are for example in the nursing home,
- if you have been in contact with infected people
- if you are a health professional over 50 years old
- if you have comorbidities.
All this allows you to gain priority or not”, Specifies Salam Mubarak, stressing that this simulator is neither official nor medical.
However, the latter recognizes that anticipating weekly immunization capacity, a crucial factor in predicting waiting time, is by no means an exact science. “The figures are based on projections of 500,000 vaccines injected per week, which reflects the current reality,” Salam Mubarak said.
But this average is bound to change over time, as you can see in our forecast graph above. Either exponentially with the arrival of new vaccines and the ramp-up of deliveries, or decreasingly in the event of new delivery concerns, embolism of vaccination capacities may occur locally, or setbacks that could encounter vaccines that have yet to receive marketing authorization.
The warning issued by the German health authorities, who advise against the administration of the AstraZeneca vaccine to people over 65 years of age for lack of reliable data, shows the difficulty of anticipating in the long term the accessibility to the vaccine doses in the medium and long term.
“We make daily updates to provide the most realistic estimate possible, but we leave it to the users to change the data themselves if they wish,” said Salam Mubarak. This means that the estimated wait time for the same user could vary from day to day, depending on the updates.
Vaccine Queue Calculator : A Wide Window of Expectation
It continues to be observed whether a user will have the means to develop himself a reliable projection of the vaccination rate smoothed over several months in such an uncertain context. According to the government, more than 1.4 million people were vaccinated in France in January, but this rate is expected to slow to one million in February. That is to say a total of around 2.5 million at the end of February when the executive established ally on a figure of 4 million people vaccinated for the same date.
In defence of Vaccine Queue Calculator, free and whose creators ensure that it respects users’ data, the waiting time estimate provides a wide window. For a 47-year-old Frenchman, in great shape, who is not a contact case, the algorithm indicated Thursday that between 19 and 29 million people had to be vaccinated before him, a first injection that could take place as it is between May 4 and December 19, 2022, a second between May 25 and January 9, 2023.
A significant margin of error has the merit of inviting those in a hurry to tolerate their troubles.