Quote (Santara @ Jan 5 2021 03:33pm)
Let's do the math. A "99.85% survival rate" means 1500 people per million die from the virus. Spread across 320 million Americans, that's 480,000 dead.
If the vaccine is 95% effective, instead of 1500 deaths per million, you get 75 deaths per million, or 24,000 dead. Survival rate goes from 99.85 to 99.9925.
It's actually even better, since that 99.85 (questionable) number is after mask wearing, social distancing, and shutdowns to keep the hospitals from overflowing, and that also gave doctors time to figure out how to keep people alive through the worst part.
No distancing, no mask wearing, etc. would result in a 2% death rate (this is the minimum with unrestricted spread and only the knowledge we had in March-May) with lots of unrelated deaths since people with unrelated emergencies have no access to ICU beds.
So that's actually a drop from ~6 million.