When will the UK return to normal?

Media

In early December ITV’s Peston featured my research on when the UK would be fully vaccinated.

My vaccine predictor suggests that the UK’s vulnerable population will be vaccinated by late Spring 2021, and the rest of the population by summer 2021.

Key assumptions are:

  1. Stockpiled vaccine at end 2020.
  2. Speed with which vaccines are produced and delivered to the UK.
  3. Arrival of second, third, and fourth types of vaccine.

Even though this is a very simple model, it shows several useful things:

  1. It will take a minimum of 3 months to return to normality, even with the best case delivery and approval of vaccines.
  2. Bad mutation (ie that stops vaccines working) aside the UK is likely to return to normality by late 2021 in almost any scenario.