The new year is unlikely to be a year of economic and political success for Volodymyr Zelensky and his team.

The decline in all growth indicators will continue, although it will not be as catastrophic as in the past, 2020.

After the end of the coronavirus epidemic, Ukraine will begin to slowly get out of the recession.

Enterprises closed due to infection will start working.

However, the Ukrainian state is unlikely to be able to rise from the last place in Europe in terms of socio-economic indicators.

According to the IMF forecast, in 2021, the recovery growth of GDP in Ukraine will amount to 3.6%, inflation - 7.2%, unemployment - 9.3%.

Health Minister Maxim Stepanov announced that the epidemic will begin to subside in April.

However, there have never been any clear prospects for mass vaccination.

Released data indicate that a very small percentage of the population - 2 to 4% - will receive the vaccine until around the end of spring.

And this is a big question.

However, the authorities are optimistic.

Chief sanitary doctor Viktor Lyashko claims that in Ukraine the disease will begin to recede earlier than, for example, in Germany.

“Roughly, I believe that already from May 2021 we will have such an adaptive quarantine that will allow us to breathe easier.

It will no longer be the same as it was during this period.

But the seasonality of the virus will also contribute to this.

I think we will see a clear seasonality and in the spring-summer period the coronavirus will reduce its aggressiveness and circulation.

Plus, a vaccine will appear - and every day more and more people will be vaccinated against the coronavirus, form immunity, which will gradually become collective, and we will forget about this terrible disease altogether, ”Lyashko said.

However, there are not many reasons for such optimism.

It is unclear where the aforementioned herd immunity will come from in the spring, if vaccination begins in February at best, and even then with microscopic doses.

Ukraine does not have its own vaccine, and it is extremely doubtful that with the current state of its science and medicine, it will appear, and negotiations on purchases in the West have not yielded any results.

The Ukrainian leadership refused to purchase Russian drugs.

Vaccines, which Ukraine can count on in the framework of free humanitarian aid (global initiative COVAX), have not yet passed all stages of testing.

Accordingly, they do not have certificates even in the producing countries.

And besides them, the drugs must be approved by the World Health Organization, which distributes humanitarian aid.

This is a few more months for research.

But even if a miracle happens and Ukraine manages to find a vaccine, this will not solve the problem.

Vaccination rates in Ukrainian conditions will be catastrophically low.

The Kiev School of Economics came to the conclusion that vaccination can take six months, and during this period only 36% of the population will be vaccinated.

“In Ukraine, there are approximately 13.5 million people over 55 who are at risk for COVID-19.

They must be vaccinated first.

We estimate that even in an ideal world, when all 6,580 family medicine outpatient clinics will vaccinate patients for eight hours a day without breaks and weekends, this will last six months.

This is only 36% of the population, which does not even guarantee the establishment of herd immunity.

In the real world, it is almost impossible to provide such efficiency.

And for the deployment of additional vaccination points in order to increase the throughput, additional medical personnel are needed, ”the CSE report says.

Thus, the resources available to Ukraine make it possible to vaccinate slightly more than a third of the population in more than six months.

This is not enough for the development of herd immunity.

In the West, they claim that 60-80% should be vaccinated.

Given the fact that Ukrainians have nowhere to wait for vaccines, it is safe to predict that the number of deaths from infection in the coming year will seriously increase.

At the end of last year, there were already 18,019 of them. But they began to be recorded only in February.

Ukraine has recently reached its current indicators of 100-200 people a day.

And while the decline to the level of last winter and spring is not visible.

And this means that the surge in incidence can be very significant.

Only Russian drugs that can be produced in Ukraine can change this situation.

Moscow has already offered its help.

But Washington imposed a ban on the vaccine from Russia.

And it is extremely doubtful that the Ukrainian authorities would dare to disobey.

The author's point of view may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.