BooF! I forgot the click-on-avatar trick. Thanks for reminding me.
I envy you the natural beauty of your area. I’m sure you enjoy it when circumstances allow you to venture out.
Oh, I get to go out. I’m in the middle of 80 acres and can go outside any time I please. That and the cats keep me sane (or at least as sane as I was to start with – )
I am very aggravated and need to revise my estimate.
Ontario announced that they will only start to vaccinate people in the 60-65 range on July 1. Given that I will be 51, that does not bode well for my June estimate. This is also counter to the federal government promising that “everyone who wants a vaccine will get one by September”.
Ontario has retired General Rick Hillier running things, and while he may be a logistics expert in the Army, this does not make a lot of sense in that the 65+ population amounts to less than 15% or our total.
Always nice to hear from another cat person. My three cats do the same for me. Post a kitty picture or two of yours some time-there is a pet picture thread here somewhere.
Enjoy those acres. Fun squirrel, rabbit and bird watching too, I hope.
Minnesota is at a tier for over-65, PreK-12 educators, and childcare providers. I had hoped that educators would include college faculty/staff, since we have been open the entire time(with masking and distancing) but we don’t show up in the proposed next phase, which include firefighters, law enforcement, etc. Our union has sent an email directing us to the governor’s office to get college educators included in the next phase. Otherwise I think it will be late April or May or June, since I’m 63.
Looks like good news for more vaccine availability in the upcoming months:
Blockquote
Pfizer Chief Business Officer John Young said the company, which has delivered 40 million doses total as of a week ago, has made “significant investments” in its US manufacturing. He expects to increase the number of weekly doses delivered to 13 million from 4 to 5 million by mid-March.
Moderna President Stephen Hoge said the company has shipped 54 million vaccines in total from its December approval to last week. Now, with its scaled up productions, the company is on track to double deliveries to more than 40 million doses per month by April.
That plus J&J should make much more vaccine available at the end of March for the US.
February 18th. Astra Zeneca. No side effects to speak of. Get in!!
We just had a two-day vaccination event in my smallish, rural-ish town, the first time any vaccines have been given here. A woman on NextDoor posted that she was a few months shy of 65 years old, but went in and asked if she qualified as a 65-year-old. The nurses said that she did, and she received her first shot.
I’m a few months shy of 65. I should have gone in, but I didn’t think I qualified. Is this a thing? Can 64 and a half year olds get the shot now?
It sounds like the nurse used their discretion to slightly bend the rules.
Minnesota released a new vaccination timeline yesterday. They’re still working through Pre-K through 12th grade educators and 65+, and estimate that will take through March. In April, the plan is to start with “People with specific high-risk health conditions” and targeted essential workers.
April-May also adds people 45-64 with one or more high-risk health conditions, people 18-44 with two or more high-risk health conditions, essential front line workers and people over 50 living in multi-generational housing.
It goes from there with “everyone else” listed under Summer.
I will be in the next group thanks to the organ transplant. The entire family signed up for the Vaccine Connector Tool, where you give your general demographics and there’s a check list of specific medial concerns and employment situations. Supposedly, they will notify you when you’re up, and you can set an appointment through the state (if you want).
Regarding Hy-Vee: I think it’s wonderful they have been a force in getting vaccines to the general populace, often in smaller communities. Unfortunately, they have done nothing to assist their employees, front line staff, in obtaining the vaccine. My kid is the only one in her department who has not been hit with COVID. Entire departments have had to close due to infection. They aren’t even allowing employees who qualify under the current state protocol to obtain vaccines at their own stores while on the clock.
The spouse had her first one today (Pfizer) and they’re starting to open up the “groups” behind mine, so my notification should in theory be imminent. Apparently the whole process was extremely efficient.
My mother (in the US) went for hers a few weeks ago. My father reports she grumbled about all the “old people in line in front of her slowing things down”. All the “old people” were younger than her. 
Another Minnesotan - I had missed the “multigenerational housing” - that should boost my husband and I - we are in our 50s and our adult son lives with us. Although neither of us is in a huge hurry - we are both (relatively) healthy in terms of covid risk factors, both have worked from home since pre-pandemic, and have no huge need to get vaccinated before our friends (and that includes 20 year olds) because we have agreed not to meet in person until everyone is vaccinated.
Besides, I think we are about to go from shortage to bounty fairly quickly - and the difference might be a month.
What is driving me nuts right now is my 82 year old mother in law. Who is being Minnesotan about the whole thing “someone might need it more than I do” and waiting for her doctor to give it to her during an appointment (it isn’t going to work that way until Fall), and doesn’t want to bother us for a ride (we will seriously drop everything to get her to a vaccination location) - she finally, after two weeks of us begging, got herself an appointment - for next month - at the local clinic. She’s going to try to get into somewhere else sooner. (She’s also losing cognitive ability, but is fighting that - so NO HELP. Its like when my kids were toddlers trying to dress themselves).
And this is why I was a good project manager - estimation skills! After two months, the state of Minnesota has released the same timeline I cam up with on the back of an envelope in December… https://mn.gov/covid19/vaccine/whos-getting-vaccinated/index.jsp
I just got a call yesterday from the food bank I volunteer for, and they said I can sign up for a vaccination tomorrow since I deliver food to the elderly (as in, go inside their buildings and apartments), so I’m signed up to get my first jab in the morning. I didn’t even inquire about it – they just told me they had two more spaces left under their invitation code, so I took it. I wasn’t expecting, otherwise, to get my first dose until May or June. (I’m 45.)
I figured my kid would get hers before me, seeing as she’s frontline essential staff. In fact, up until yesterday, that was sort of how it was to have rolled out. But now that they’ve added the different levels of pre-existing conditions, it’s all changed.
So now we just wait until either the state says “GO!” or we’re contacted by our PCP offices, I guess.
I never understood this business of creating multiple bookmarks/tabs to secure the first vaccination appointment. Hasn’t it been established that the bank lobby queue system is more efficient? (One line, multiple tellers, whichever teller opens up first gets to serve the next person in line.) Is there any state or country that schedules its vaccinations that way?
I admit that the analogy with a bank lobby queue is not perfect. The next person in line is not guaranteed to have the means of transportation or the time availability to visit the “teller” who opens up. Based on the posts above, Massachusetts is among the states to have at least this aspect of the bank lobby queue in place: the ability to see at a glance how many people are in front of you. But I wish more states would start to centralize their registration systems, so that nobody needs to monitor multiple websites just to secure an appointment.
As you say, the process is completely decentralized, which makes control like you describe difficult. For example, here in California we have the sites operated by the county, the sites operated by retail pharmacies (e.g. CVS), and the sites operated by the major health systems (e.g. Kaiser). None of them talk to the others.
I don’t think doing it statewide works well because it may be a two-day trip from one part of the state to another. I don’t need to know when there’s an appointment in the Adirondacks or in New York City.
I do think, as I’ve said before, that there ought to be waitlists organized by county in the rural areas and by city or in large cities by neighborhood in urban areas.
Instead every individual possible provider seems to be running its own sites; and this is made worse by the fact that most of them don’t even take waitlists, they just tell you to keep checking back.
I’ve tuned in to a number of governors’ press briefings hoping to hear why they aren’t scheduling vaccination appointments several months in advance. Is it more the geographical size of the state, or the lack of coordination among the different site operators, that dictates the feasibility of making a three-month schedule and filling the slots with people from the appropriate tier?
My aunt in CT has an appointment near the end of March, which she learned about almost two weeks ago. It would be interesting to see whether the average lead time is correlated with the geographical size of the state. If not, then having multiple independent site operators is probably the bigger obstacle to 3-month advance scheduling of vaccine appointments.
Nobody balks at the practice of scheduling a 6-month dental checkup right after the cleaning that just happened. The dentists themselves might not even have on hand the actual materials that will be used on you in 6 months; they can restock from their suppliers because demand is predictable. But these same considerations apply equally well to the vaccine distribution problem. Why weren’t these logistics resolved and a vaccination timetable laid out for the whole population (or at least the threshold needed for herd immunity), while Pfizer and Moderna were still waiting for EUA?
They don’t appear to know in one week how much, if any, vaccine any particular site will get in the next week. I’m sure they don’t know how much they’ll have been able to get by three months from now.
If Connecticut’s scheduling six weeks in advance, I don’t understand how they’re doing that; at least, unless they’re just taking a wild guess and figuring that they’ll be contacting a lot of people to change appointment dates in one direction or the other.