When Will Business Return to Normal in the Furniture Industry?

AUSTIN, Texas - Jan. 6, 2021 - PRLog -- The recent approval by US health authorities of two new Covid 19 vaccines that have proven highly effective during clinical trials offers hope that we could return to some sense of normality during 2021.

Vaccination programs are already well underway and, by the end of 2021, Pfizer-BioNTech plans to ship 1.3 billion doses of its vaccine, and Moderna expects to ship around 500 million.

White House officials said they expect that 20 million Americans will be vaccinated by the end of December 2020, and it is hoped that by the middle of 2021, the majority of Americans will be vaccinated, bringing us closer to the 70 – 90% figure that public health officials believe would bring widespread herd immunity against the virus.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg is tracking the daily progress of vaccination efforts around the world, and, at the time of writing, they report that 2.13 million Americans have already received an initial vaccine dose, well short of the White House's estimates, but still a positive development.

The CDC recently issued vaccine program guidelines that identify which cohorts should receive priority for vaccination, although, at this time, the federal government is letting states set the final priorities. (Texas, for example, has moved those with comorbidities into the second tier.) When could you receive the vaccine? The New York Times has created a useful interactive online tool to help individuals estimate when they might receive the vaccine.

Many challenges remain for a safe and effective vaccination program, starting with logistics companies, such as FedEx and UPS, which must maintain these two new vaccines at exceptionally cold temperatures, particularly the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, which must be stored at -70 C.

While that may seem impossible, it's only a little bit colder than existing "cold chain" logistics operations that ship food-grade raw tuna to Japan, where shipments are kept at -60 C to avoid discoloring the fish. Refrigeration specialists, such as Thermo King, have adapted their freezer designs, originally built for transporting tuna, to accommodate shipping the new vaccines to the US by air from the main manufacturing plant in Belgium. Other innovations include IoT sensors added inside each transport container, which monitor temperatures and sound and alarm if something goes wrong.

The second challenge that has concerned public health officials throughout the pandemic is whether the virus will mutate, and thus, render the vaccines less effective.

Will the new vaccines be able to protect us against this new variant or others that many yet emerge?

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