Covid-19 Vaccine (Potion, Uncommon)
When injected with this potion you gain a +4 bonus to saves against Coronavirus. If combined with a face mask, the bonus increases to +8. :)
The latest that I've heard is that the vaccine will prevent you from feeling the symptoms and dying from the infection. It will not prevent you from being infected or passing it along to other people. If you've already been infected at one point, you still need the vaccine. The immune response is only temporary. Considering how slowly the vaccinations are going nationwide, maybe 50% of the population will be fully vaccinated by convention time. Making enough of the doses is only half the battle; Administering them is the other half. Realistically, I think that Gencon would have to be running at 25% of the building's capacity, which is probably 10% of normal attendance. To get their numbers down, they'd have to start by mandating vaccinations for attendees. But the biggest problem that we will face is behavior during Gencon. I'm a middle school teacher, and the kids know that they are required to maintain a fix foot distance and keep their masks over their nose. We spend half of our day telling them to pull their masks up, and social distancing is completely alien to their nature. They have an adult with the authority to police them at all times. Can you imagine what will happen in a much less structured environment like Gencon? Think about your experiences in the dealer's hall.
We are already at about 30 million people who have gotten at least one dose, and needless to say the new administration is putting in renewed efforts to put on the real warp speed here. So there are 330 million people in the U.S., but about 70 million are children, so the total target pool is about 260 million adults. And, well, considering some of the horrifying anti-vaccination numbers I have seen, you have to assume at least 1/4 of those people are going to refuse to get vaccinated. So (yes, wow, are these ever some fast and loose numbers, but you see my point) we are "only" looking at vaccinating another 165 million people in the next six months. Sounds doable to me, considering at the current rate of 1.65 million vaccinations a day you would get to 165 million people with at least a first dose by June.
I'm not sure that the vaccination rate is the problem so much as in trying to plan an event like GenCon, how late can you make the decision about whether or not people will be sufficiently vaccinated. The numbers (however fast and loose they are) also assume that 1) nothing goes wrong with the supply chain, 2) the vaccines are effective against the new strains, and 3) the current vaccine rates stay the same or increase. Personally, I don't want to bet against Murphy and his A-hole Corollaries. For example, the vaccine roll out in my state has been fraught. We haven't finished vaccinating all our 1a folks, but they've opened up to 1c people, and are running out of vaccines. There's a huge push to send teachers back to school, but they postponed the teacher/school vaccine clinics until the end of February in my county due to lack of supply and needing to prioritize those in group 1a. I'm certain things will progress more smoothly over time, but I wouldn't plan a convention on it.
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