Did you get your first shot at one of the chain pharmacies? I’ve actually been fairly happy with how efficient Rexall has been so far. I put my name and preferred location into their system the day they announced the drop in eligibility to 40+, and 72 hours later I was texted with a list of appointments from which to choose (this was in the peak of “boomers are freaked at the blood clots, get the young 'uns in so they don’t go to waste”). When AZ was temporarily put on hold, they emailed me with a “We’re on it, we’ll fill you in as soon as we know what he province decides.” message, which I appreciated.
The August 19th date you got was possibly not a firm appointment date; my official record sticker that I’m keeping in my wallet says “Follow-up dose eligible after: Aug. 7, 2021” so it wasn’t carved in stone at the time.
It’s a solid date, even with a time of day to go back, or it was solid then. Now they have no idea, and no chain pharmacy has any sort of system for dealing with second dose AZ orphans.
This probably varies by province. BC was crystal clear: either wait for the pharmacy to contact you for Dose 2, or book for your second dose of Pfizer with the province when you’re eligible. “Don’t contact the pharmacy” was a pretty clear directive. We become eligible for the second shot on Tuesday next week, so we’ll see whether things are as straightforward as they sound.
It absolutely varies by province. I haven’t been following closely here as I didn’t get AZ for my first shot, but there have been AZ-only drive-thru/walk-in clinics rotating through the usual locations here in SK. I’m not sure if they’ve also got AZ-options for booking appointments from SHA (Saskatchewan Health Authority) for the by-appointment vaccine sites they’re running. I would assume so, but playing with the booking site indicates I have to get pretty much to the point of actually booking an appointment to find out for sure, and I’m not yet eligible. At the moment, the pharmacies are getting only Pfizer and Moderna.
In other news, we should pass Israel today in percentage of population with first dose. Also, our delivery rate over the past 3-4 weeks has exceeded pretty much all peer nations.
You can see a rise the cases in the UK. The UK is also stating that the vast majority of cases are linked to the delta variant.
But look at the vaccination rates COVID-19 Data Explorer - Our World in Data and assume a 70% immunity from 1 dose and 85% from a 2nd Canada and the UK have roughly the same coverage rate with the UK being ahead.
It would seem to me that a massive push to get more 1st doses in arms needs to happen. Moving a person from 0-70% coverage is way more important to short circuit transmission than moving a 70% to 85%.
That said I’ll take my 2nd doses whenever they get offered.
Do other provinces have a centralized health authority like we do in Saskatchewan? Because I’ve not heard a lot of people talking about having trouble booking appointments with pharmacies. The booking system I’ve used was province -wide, run through the SHA. Booking through pharmacies only started when the eligibility group got down below 40 and there were a lot more people needing vaccines.
But again, maybe I’m just oblivious to these things.
Alberta just opened up second-shot registration for everyone who got their first shot in April. My wife and I signed up, and should have ours this next Tuesday night.
Here in Alberta, there was a government website and a phone number, but the website only provided information (for example, which pharmacies were participating), and the phone number was always backed up (“Your estimated wait time is … sixty … eight … minutes”). My neighbour, who works for Alberta Health, told me to call a pharmacy directly, which is what I did. And what we all eventually did, as things turned out.
The Shopper’s Drug where I got my first shot said they would call me when they could give me my second. They had no idea when that would be, but if the news is correct and more vaccines are indeed coming into Canada, then I expect it won’t be too much longer.
Depends on availability. There also seems to be less of an issue of clotting with second doses, and the first doses of AZ tended to be to over 50 folk and less risk to start with.
My second dose was AZ.
Plus, procurement and general guidelines are at the federal level, but actual implementation and shots in the arm are at the provincial level, so it may not be uniform across the country.
BC has 5 Regional Health Authorities and one overarching provincial one (Provincial Health Services Authority) that runs province wide specialized services like BC Cancer, Specialty pediatric unit in Vancouver, and the BC Center for Disease Control which collects Covid stats, and vaccination protocols.
I doubt that one percentage point is statistically significant, but it does illustrate how the Canadian government has gone all in on the “get at least one shot into as many as possible” approach.
There’s a very obvious reason why we shot to the top in single doses: We stopped giving second doses and dedicated our resourses to first doses first. The cost of that is that of today we have fully vaccinated 12% of the population vs 43% in the U.S, 44% in the UK and 59% in Israel.
We did the right thing IMO, but this is not a success story. If the new variants show up here, our population will still be significantly less protected than the other countries mentioned.
I was impressed with the ease with which I got my first dose appointment back in April and the efficiency with which the whole process was handled (I’m in Ontario). I am currently much less impressed with trying to reschedule my second dose of Pfizer, the original second dose booking being in mid-August. Today was the first day that I was officially eligible to reschedule an early booking for the second dose, and I got nowhere. My results varied between “no bookings available in your area” to the nearest available site being nearly 100 km away. I know there’s a huge community vaccination clinic just up the road where I got my first jab and am scheduled for my second in August, but it’s not currently offering me any slots.
