5. SMARTER, FASTER LOGISTICS

“Provinces need to know

when supplies of given vaccines will arrive, in what numbers and with what degree of certainty,” Naylor said. Supplies need to be distributed strategically across sites and usage rates monitored so that people don't leave vaccines in storage others could happily, and rapidly, be deploying. “We need advanced logistics integrating both levels of government and the sites where vaccines are being given,” Naylor said. “Otherwise we'll be holding back vaccines in freezers as much by accident as design.”

How much fine graining do we do? When dealing with a countrywide rollout, broad guidelines make sense, Naylor said. But we also need the latitude to make “defensible exceptions.”

In the broader scheme, “here's how I see the math,” he said. The federal government has said it still expects to receive 6 million doses of vaccines by the end of March. With 6 million doses, 3 million Canadians can be immunized, leaving roughly 35 million more to get shots. Subtract about five-million kids under 13 (the merits of immunizing 0 to 12 are still unclear, Naylor said). That leaves 30-million teens and adults. “Immunizing twothirds of those 30 million souls won't stop the epidemic, but could slow things down meaningfully,” Naylor said.

That's 20 million people, or 40 million doses. The federal government has said we can expect 20 million doses of the Pfizer and Moderna shots in the second quarter, from April 1 to June 30. Approving Johnson & Johnson's one-dose vaccine would provide more breathing room.

But the bottom line is simple, Naylor said: We need to figure out how to move many times faster than we're moving now.

Doses of the PfizerBioNTech COVID-19 vaccine are ready for distribution in Toronto. Rollout of the vaccine nationally is going slower than expected.