A UNIVERSITY of the Philippines-Los Baños engineer and a De La Salle University-Manila researcher created a Covid19 vaccine queue calculator to help Filipinos monitor if the national vaccination plan is being followed.

“We created this calculator to deliver all the answers to all these crucial questions. The Vaccine Queue Calculator for the Philippines will estimate for you how many people are ahead of you in the queue to get a COVID vaccine in the Philippines. It also predicts how long you might have to wait to get your vaccine doses. Using our tool, you’ll have a better idea of when you can expect to get vaccinated,” said Kenneth Alambra, a civil engineer from UP-Los Baños.

Reina Sagnip, a researcher from DLSU-Manila, joined his friend in producing the pioneering device for the Omni Calculator Project, based on the national priority list released by the government.

Alambra said as the country began its Covid19 vaccination, questions lingered in his mind such as ‘how far in the queue am I?’

He said he tried searching for an answer, but instead ended up building a tool that calculates it.

“Since there are around 110 million people in the Philippines, not everybody can get vaccinated immediately. It raises a whole load of new questions: Who will be first in the queue to get the vaccine? When are you likely to be offered it? How far are we away from the finish line?” he asked.

Alambra further said they based their vaccine queue calculator on the data provided by the Philippine National Deployment and Vaccination Plan for Covid19 Vaccines for the priority list, and the likely vaccination rate to achieve the government’s target to vaccinate 50-70 percent of the adult population for the rest of 2021.

The vaccine queue calculator considers the person’s age, profession, health condition, and risk factors.

According to the two inventors, the vaccine queue calculator will also indicate how long it might be before one gets both doses of the vaccine and be fully protected, based on the vaccination rate.

In its ‘Changelog’, the inventors updated the current actual rate of vaccination to the running average rate of 32,940 individuals vaccinated per day as released by the Department of Health after vaccinating 738,913 individuals in the country as of March 30.