Germany’s Vaccination Backlog
Quite often we hear in the news the lament that “if only we would have enough vaccine!”. In principal that is true, but more the theoretical claim, that only if we would have 170 Mio doses, everybody in Germany could get the two shots … Fact is, that being Germans and doing everything as thorough as possible – or even more – the process isn’t that fast, and in fact we have millions of unused doses. There is certainly some need to keep a certain backlog to avoid shortages when the one or other company does not deliver in time, but the current backlog is enough to cover roughly three weeks of vaccinations without any newly delivered doses.
Looking at the different German federal states, wee see quite a difference in the efficiency of the vaccination process. Given the data as of March 13th, North Rhine-Westphalia has a backlog of more than 36%, whereas Bavaria and Bremen (structurally quite different) are at about 20%.
Here is the data visualized
