I’m in the same boat as the OP was. I do want the vaccine, I don’t want to spend a day driving to get it (and then do the same a month from now). I’m on waiting lists, I check the websites, etc. I know I could be more diligent about it, but I’ve been in quarantine for 13 months now, I can hold out for another two.
(And honestly, I didn’t expect to get vaccinated until June anyway - so…)
I keep seeing this thread. Am I the only one who never heard the term GOMD before?
Googling shows it comes from rap lyrics.
I agree that MyTurn.ca.gov is pretty useless. I’ve had good luck with vaccinespotter.org actually showing available appointments and not entirely noise (with some exceptions).
For the second shot, at least in my area, the pharmacies will let you schedule a month ahead, where for the first shot you can only get an appointment within a couple of days. I had a great deal of trouble getting my first shot and drove 2.5+ hours to get it on April 2. The very next day I scouted pharmacy sites and CVS let me schedule my second shot on May 2nd 30 minutes from my house.
I don’t commonly encounter it, but the “get off my ____” construction is so common that it made sense to me that people would use it. I’ve also encountered other situations where “ass” gets changed to “dick” in colloquial expressions in order to intensify them (e.g. “stop riding my dick” instead of “stop riding my ass.”)
I’ve never seen it before, but the meaning seemed obvious.
I just got an appointment scheduled for 4/21. They also instantly scheduled my second appointment (no choice, both were scheduled at the same time).
And it is within walking distance of where I live so that’s good.
My Michigan county is fucked. The neighboring county I work in is much more organized. It’s crazy even locally how great the disparity can be.
I love language.
This is the problem with pushing responsibility for major public health campaigns down to the county health departments which are just not constituted to deal with this kind of effort even given sufficient funding. County and municipal health departments primarily deal with issues such as sanitation, food safety, and so forth and many do not even employ either an epidemiologist or anyone trained in crisis management, particularly on this scale, Some health departments are doing well because they either had employees with pertinent skills or just the good sense to be organized and solicit help but it has been stunning to see how much politics and petty jurisdictional rivalries have affected pandemic response and vaccine campaign rollout.
Stranger
Good for you.
YMMV, but when I woke up the day after the second shot with a bit of a headache, some aches and pains, and lethargic as all get out, I immediately ate a medicinal gummy bear, did one critical email, let my boss know I was out of action, and went back to bed for 6 hours.
Did your boss get on your dick?
Because you can take them to court for that…
I got the second appointment scheduled automatically as well, but only at the time of the shot. They just gave me a little card with a date and time on it.
Levi Stadium seemed to be a pretty efficient operation. Took about an hour beginning to end, and a significant part of that was just walking. The person I was assigned to couldn’t tell me how many they were doing per day, but said they were dose-limited up until they got a big shipment. That seems like the best case to me given that some places are having trouble finding people to come in. The estimate I saw of 15,000 per day seemed plausible.
I went to Walgreens and was thinking how inefficient it was although maybe they were dose limited so were in no rush.
I had an appointed time and was told to arrive 15 minutes early. I did, they had me fill out a form (which I could have filled out ahead of time) then, after a couple minutes, I got the shot. After that I had to wait 15-20 minutes to see if there was a reaction and I was on my way.
So, it wasn’t “slow” but it was not exactly fast either. While I was there I saw four other people get vaccinated.
I recall the days of polio vaccines where there was a line a mile long and they marched by getting vaccinated one after another (I guess they did not have to social distance):
https://www.kmuw.org/sites/kmuw/files/202101/kansas_town.jpg
Levi Stadium wasn’t too different from your picture, though with extra steps and fewer people just hanging around. Show the appointment message on the way in, walk in the front through a metal detector, get handed the forms, fill them out as you’re progressing through the lines, get directed to a station to show ID and such, to another station to get the shot, then to a waiting area to check reactions. All a nice continuous process with almost no waiting (except at the end). There were a few dozen stations for the ID check and shot, and they only took a couple minutes each. That would make 15k/day achievable.
To be fair, the place I went to was a local pharmacy (big here in Chicago, they are everywhere). They are not really equipped to handle a mass of people waiting in the store.
Chicago does use a sports arena, the United Center, for vaccinations. I have to assume they are running an operation like the one at Levi Stadium.
Yeah, doesn’t surprise me that it might be a tad less efficient at a pharmacy, given the general pharmacy experience (just getting a prescription filled is a pretty inefficient thing in my experience). Still, it probably took about the same amount of time since the mass-vax approach requires more individual steps and a fair amount of walking between them.
My first vaccine was at a big (for us) pubic site that did 1200 people per day. There was a line but a bunch of stations inside. They were probably sticking eight people at a time.
My second vaccine was at a CVS where they were doing one person every fifteen minutes. There were two stations.
In both cases I was done in about half an hour including the fifteen minute wait.
Mine was (and will be again on Fri) in the small pharmacy section of a major chain grocery store. One table & 2 chairs set up in front of the magazine rack with a store clerk to hand you the paper form & answer any questions. Hand the filled form to the lone pharm tech at her window then hang around until there’s a gap in the action and the lone pharmacist can come out, sit you in the hot seat, do the jab then direct you to one of the 4 chairs in the nearby produce aisle to wait your 15 minutes then leave.
The whole process had me in the store 25 minutes and while there I saw about 5 people ahead of me and 5 behind. So they were probably processing ~12/hour steadily. While doing all the usual pharmacy stuff for their non-COVID customers.
As long as they hand out appointments at the same rate they process people, there is zero reason to see a bigger crowd than the rate they’re doing people plus a short pipeline on both ends. Seeing a waiting crowd would be a sign of disorganization, not organization.
Unless it’s simply first-come-first served. Which system works great in the big venues with drive-up, but is dangerous for COVID because bored crowds on foot don’t social distance well.
Yes, it is. I was able to sign up for an apt the first day I was eligible. But it was for 4 weeks later. And our system here in NH is set up that once you have an apt you can’t even look to see if another site has a sooner slot without first canceling your existing apt…
I was able to make appointments for both the first and second shots at the same time on the MyTurn site. Apart from some confusion about where to go when I arrived (the address given was for the main building of the site where the vaccine clinic was being held, but the clinic was actually in the smaller building next door), it seemed like a pretty efficient operation when I went for my first shot. It was pretty much like the Levi Stadium operation, but on a smaller scale. Check in, wait in a short line, go up to the table where the nurse confirms your identity, does the spiel about side effects and administers the shot, then sit in the observation area for 15 minutes. The whole thing only took about 30 minutes from beginning to end.