I’m curious what makes you think May for the majority of the 60+ population to be vaccinated? According to BC’s plan we are looking at Feb-March to start on the 80 plus crowd. It seems overly optimistic to think that they will be able to move on to those 60 and over by May. And that’s assuming the rollout goes as planned.
The vaccine rollout is not going to be linear. It will scale, fast. There has been a lot of angst lately over the slow pace of the initial distribution, which is understandable. Nobody is feeling very patient right now. But it was always going to start slowly, particularly when we started with what is logistically by far the most difficult vaccine to administrate, over the Christmas holiday.
There are about 3.5 million Canadians over the age of 70. Projections from the beginning have estimated 3 million Canadians fully vaccinated by the end of March, and I don't think there's any reason yet to believe that's not realistic. The federal update today re-confirmed the expectation of 6 million doses by the end of March. Not everyone will get the vaccine, and production is expected to ramp up in April and beyond. So even allowing for some priority vaccination groups under the age of 70, I still think it's entirely plausible to expect that we'll be comfortably into vaccination of the 60-70 cohort by May.
Of course, every province has its own plan, and I'm by no means familiar with all of them. Maybe BC is more highly prioritizing factors other than age? In Ontario, we are looking at getting first doses into LTC residents and staff in harder-hit areas (so, basically, anywhere there are people) within the next two weeks, and the very elderly are next in line.
And yes, it does assume that more vaccines are approved and that the rollout proceeds more or less as planned. But actually I don't think the plan even assumes that absolutely everything will go right. It could go slower, but it could go faster too.
I'm not really an optimistic person by nature. I've been saying since April that cruising would not restart until there was some fundamental shift - vaccine, effective treatment, or, least likely, a general willingness to just accept that people will get sick and move on. My philosophy through this whole thing has been to assume the most pessimistic scenario is usually the one that will prevail, and most of the time, that's turned out to be right. But this is just basic math.
Time will tell. None of us have a crystal ball. Maybe something catastrophic will happen to disrupt supply, or none of the additional vaccines that are expected to come online will be approved. But based current expectations, for now I'm sticking with May.