Want To Know When You’ll Get The Covid-19 Vaccine? This (Unofficial) Queue Calculator Might Help

A team in the UK is trying to make vaccine roll-out calculators for every country using public information.

Credit: World Health Organisation

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The first phase of Covid-19 vaccines been distributed to our frontliners, and there’s more to come.

The government has identified and outlined the key people in separate phases who would be receiving the vaccines.

Currently, the plan for Covid-19 vaccinations will be delivered in three phases:

Phase 1 (February – April 2021) – frontliners consisting of essential services, defense, security personnel, and high-risk teachers
Phase 2 (April – August 2021) – high risk groups and those aged 60 years old and above
Phase 3 (May 2021 – February 2022) – Malaysians aged 18 years old and above.

However, that’s merely a guideline, and the lengthy time frame isn’t particularly helpful for people who may be trying to make long term plans to travel internationally and the like.

The Vaccine Queue Calculator

Enter the Vaccine Queue Calculator website, which tracks the disbursement of vaccines in the country and figures out where you place in the queue is.

(Do take note that this website is not affliated with Malaysia’s Health Ministry or government. Instead, they are simply taking data announced by the government for use in this calculation.)

All you need to do is enter your personal details, such as age and occupation.

Age, health condition, and career are all factors to where you place in the Covid-19 vaccine queue.
(Credit: Omni Calculator)

Naturally, your health, occupation, and age determines your priority and how soon you can get the vaccine.

For example, a low-risk young adult with no existing health issues who is not a frontliner or teacher is not prioritized. Hence, they will have an estimated 7,960,379 to 17,632,736 people in front of them in the queue for a COVID vaccine across Malaysia.

The website tells you where you are likely placed in the vaccine queue and the estimated time for your first and second doses of the vaccine.
(Credit: Omni Calculator)

Thus, they are estimated to receive their first vaccine after August 2020.

However, the base figure of 100,000 vaccinations per day is merely an estimation, as official figures have not yet been released by the Ministry of Health. The calculator also assumes that the vaccine will be taken by 80% of the population.

More precise estimates will be provided when Malaysia’s Health Ministry makes updates on the vaccine roll-out.

The global queue tracker

This Vaccine Queue Calculator was developed by Dr. Steven Wooding for the Omni Calculator Project. The web content developer with a Masters in Physics developed the javascript code used for this calculator.

Although he and his team is based in the UK and originally created the calculator for the vaccine roll-out in the UK, they have since expanded the website calculator to include data for multiple countries globally.

We actually hope we can make one for each country to help people get an idea of when they can receive their vaccines. However, since our vaccine calculators rely on the data released by the countries, we can only make the vaccine calculators for countries that have data released publicly.
Steven Wooding to TRP

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