From the Editor: Clock is ticking on La. vaccinations

We’re good at finding ways to make divisions among ourselves: Democrat vs. Republican, conservative vs. liberal, millennial vs. boomer, city vs. country, black vs. white.
And now we’ve found a new way: people who desperately want the COVID-19 vaccine and those who hate the idea.
This comment popped up on our Jan. 26 story about struggles experienced by Ochsner St. Mary and Franklin Foundation Hospital to cope with the limited vaccine supply:
“Funny how people just line up to be Government guinea pigs.”
On the other side, I have a Facebook friend in Lafayette who doesn’t qualify for the earliest doses of the Pfizer and Moderna two-shot vaccines. But he wanted the shot.
So he called the local Walgreens and CVS pharmacies and said that if they had leftover vaccine at the end of the day, and the choice was use it or throw it out, they could call him and he’d come running.
It worked. He got his shot.
Even those of us who have been vaccinated or have made up our minds to get the shot have to admit that “vaccine hesitancy” isn’t a crazy idea.
Sure, some of more tightly wound friends think the shots are a tracking chip delivery vehicle masterminded by Bill Gates or Hugo Chavez or somebody. Even so, you have to admit that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines made an awfully quick journey through a notoriously slow regulatory bureaucracy.
But here’s the thing: a clock is ticking.
New COVID-19 variants are appearing all over the world. So far, they don’t seem to be more dangerous than the bug that has made our lives miserable for almost a year. But they do seem to spread more easily — up to 50% more easily, according to media accounts.
Modeling suggests the UK variant, which is already known to have shown up in Louisiana, could be the dominant form of the virus here by next month, Gov. John Bel Edwards said recently.
Just as we’re pulling out of the third and most deadly coronavirus surge of the pandemic, we’re faced with the possibility that another, more easily transmissible variant will push case counts up again, fill hospitals and claim more lives.
The ultimate fix is the vaccine. But, barring a miracle, the vaccine rollouts are going too slowly to make a big difference by the time the UK variant takes hold.
Using big round numbers, 40% of Louisiana’s 4.5 million people, or 1.8 million, need to be vaccinated before the phenomenon known as “herd immunity” offers widespread protection against the virus.
So far, a little more than half a million Louisiana people have been vaccinated. Vaccinating the remaining 1.3 million needed to reach the 40% mark would take until well into June, assuming this week’s Louisiana allocation of 80,000 doses remains consistent.
That’s why the governor, Dr. Joseph Kanter of the Louisiana Health Department and others are urging people to double down on mitigation measures: washing hands, wearing masks, staying home when you’re sick and avoiding crowds, even during the approaching Mardi Gras season. Especially during Mardi Gras.
Last summer, before the second wave of coronavirus infections, I estimated how much COVID was around by subtracting the number of people presumed to have recovered and the number of COVID-related deaths from the total number of Louisiana COVID cases. Back then, the number was usually around 8,000.
Now it’s more than 50,000. There’s more COVID-19 around than ever.
That’s why we’re being asked to be safe, so the baseline will be as low as possible if the new variants threaten to push the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths up again.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.