If you look at these stats objectively, even Israel's vaccination program is going badly.
Think about it: Israel is reporting 0.09% of the population is getting infected every day. The actual rate is likely 10x that: 0.9% infected/day.
Meanwhile, they're giving 2% of the population one dose per day.
A natural infection gets you ~100% immunity. A single dose, ~50%
So _even Israel_ is struggling to vaccinate people faster than they're becoming immune naturally. The US and UK aren't even close.
It's even worse in In Canada: we're vaccinating just 0.1%/day. And that figure is falling because we're running out of doses and aren't going to get more delivered for awhile.
Meanwhile, 0.014% are reported infected every day. So likely 0.14% actual.
Natural infections are immunizing Canadians at almost 3x the rate of the vaccination effort. And that'll probably get worse before it gets better due to Pfizer and Moderna''s production problems.
Now, the big caveat with all this is what is the false positive rate, and % of missed cases? I'm basing that 10x assumption on the results antibody testing kept on getting.
But as of right, now, that'd naively suggest that 70% of Israel's population has been infected, as 7% has tested positive. I'm _assuming_ during periods of lower incidence, a significant % was actually false positives, which is suggested by other studies.
But frankly, I don't know for sure! I'm not sure anyone does.
An unfortunate thing about all this is it's quite possible that we will *never* know. The vaccine basically destroys the evidence: we can only measure true infection rate by antibodies, and both an infection and a vaccination produce antibodies.
Sure, you can try to measure the people who didn't get vaccinated. But that's not a randomized sample.
Hopefully health authorities will have blood samples taken pre-vax to test later; many authorities would probably rather not know.
Oh, just realized I'm not taking into account the fact that doses are being wasted on people who have already been infected. Depends on what the true % infected is. But likely for that to be between 20% and to even 80% wastage.
Also, natural infections may be more effective at leading to herd immunity, if the people who are getting infected are ones who have lots of contacts with others. Though that may not be consistent due to lockdown changing human contact patterns.