This is another post about coronavirus information which the evening news briefings always miss out on. Britain now has a vaccination programme, and the number of daily vaccinations has started appearing on the news.

Frustratingly for me, it’s always just a stray data point without context, reporting a number is not useful if nobody explains what it means. I want to know rate of vaccination versus rate of infection. And, rate of vaccination over time, all to answer the thing everyone really wants to know: when will the virus be beaten?

Take the period for which we have data: from 11^th to 29^th January there were 6,092,368 first dose vaccinations. A rate of 320,650 per day.

The British population is 66,796,807 - minus the 8,378,940 people already vaccinated overall, leaving 58,417,867 un-vaccinated people. From there it’s a straightforward calculation: 58 million people at 320 thousand vaccinations per day, comes out at just over 182 days. So, if the NHS keeps on vaccinating at the current rate, the entire population will be covered by at least one vaccine dose by Friday 30th July 2021.

That’s a wildly inaccurate figure, because nobody knows what’s going to happen over the next six months, and despite everything the Tories still don’t have a zero-covid strategy. Nonetheless, if you have to plan for a day we can all safely and confidently come out of confinement, early August would be a good bet.