Also in four weeks they will likely have more vaccine than they thought before. Are they going to reschedule to allow earlier anyway? Or will people later in the queue get those earlier doses? Scheduling too far in advance doesn’t make sense when supplies are limited And when supplies unexpectedly increase.
I don’t understand how either—and it might not even be true in general, just true for the priority group that happened to contain my aunt. But the why is easier to conjecture: once somebody has secured an appointment, that person is no longer a drain on the bandwidth of all the websites offering vaccine appointments. The various pharmacies, county sites, etc. would only need web servers robust enough to handle a fraction of the demand they’re seeing now.
The pandemic has trained people pretty well to handle waiting, but coping with uncertainty is a much harder disposition to instill. Just giving everyone a date (even if last-minute adjustments can’t be ruled out) will go a long way toward easing the widespread anxieties.
That’s why I don’t understand why they’re not doing waiting lists. ‘OK, you’ve made contact, we’ve got your info; when your turn’s coming up we’ll call/email/text you (people should get to pick which) and you’ll then have to contact us to make a specific appointment. If that date fills up before you make one you’ll be notified of the next available date.’ They’d be dealing with a much smaller group to schedule for each batch of vaccine.
And counties if they had people’s info in advance could sort people out by multiple factors – over-65 and diabetic and customer-facing in essential work could be called in before over-65 and otherwise fine and able to work from home, for instance. I’m not sure how much they’d want to get into that, though, because there might be too many arguments about which factors or combinations of factors to weight more than others. They might prefer to do it within the CDC’s broad groups by lottery or some such.
I believe that’s pretty much how the new Minnesota state sign up is supposed to work. One question was if you are able to get the shot on short notice, so I assume they’ll hold a spot for you, based on the demographic information you provide to them.
They are really rolling it out fast in UK, I expected to be on the list by late April at the earliest for the first dose, but I got a letter with directions for booking - Monday 8th March with follow up early May - so that’s around two and a half months sooner than my likely guess
I have appointments!!!
Pfizer, CVS pharmacy, 20 minutes away from me at a village I ordinarily do errands in.
It was really pretty weird – I got a call from a friend first thing this morning that CVS had openings in another village about the same distance from me; and the web site offered me both locations with a week’s worth of dates – but all the dates showed nothing available at either location. Then another friend called and said their wife was signing up right then, and I thought maybe she’d gotten in just ahead of me but the timing didn’t seem quite right, so I tried the web site again – and at the first location I tried every time slot was open for Thursday! so I even got to choose time of day. I wonder whether that particular site hadn’t confirmed they had vaccine until just then, or whether they’d just been told they were getting more doses?
In any case, anybody in NY State who’s over 65, try checking CVS.
They were making both appointments at once. I’ll feel more confident once the shot’s actually in my arm, and even more once both of them are, but it’s great to at least have the appointments. And I’m relieved it’s Pfizer.
It doesn’t look like I ever made a guess for myself, but I’m going for my first one today. My group started yesterday and so I signed up with Walgreens last week and just made sure to choose a date after March 1st.
Another co-worker was supposed to go today, but she (grocery store worker) had her appointment cancelled because that site is now only doing teachers.
Personally, I think they should have let people that already had appointments come in anyway. Now they’re basically at the back of the line, when they could have set up that appointment at Walgreens/CVS etc earlier.
Here in London, I got an appointment for a jab though the NHS website for next week and a second in May. The intention is to do all the over 50s by mid April. Aside from health workers and those with health conditions, they are not prioritizing by professions. Too complicated, apparently. So it is priority by age group, which is much simpler.
I feel quite relieved that the UK politicians have finally made a wise decision about dealing with the Covid pandemic that seems to be working. No word on whether I will get a certificate or passport or something that lets me go abroad on holiday. They are still arguing about that one.
Illinois has just opened up slots for expanded 1b (people under 65 with certain qualifying underlying conditions, including pulmonary). However, Cook County and Chicago have both exempted themselves from that, on the grounds that there are still plenty of seniors who haven’t been vaccinated yet. So I thought I was SOL.
But apparently not - the city and county rules only apply to facilities operated by the city and the county, not to programs run by private pharmacies, etc., who are also getting vaccine allocations directly from the Feds. Some pharmacies (Walgreens) are following the City rules consistently, and some (Jewel-Osco) are not - they are following the Illinois rules. So I may be able to a) get an appointment outside the City of Chicago and/or Cook County at a pharmacy that is following the somewhat looser Illinois rules, or b) wait a bit and get an appointment somewhere in Chicago in the relatively near future, now that there’s a giant vaccination site about to open up at the United Center?
A friend of mine messaged me last night to inform me that he was the Vaccine Fairy, and that he had managed to get appointments for half a dozen (qualifying) people by following tips on a local Facebook page set up to help people navigate the confusing and contradictory instructions from the several overlapping layers of public and private entities that are kinda-sorta running the show. It’s so confusing that many times, the employees of these very same entities don’t know what rules they are supposed to follow. Anyway, my friend offered to help me line up an appointment (through legitimate, publicly available means that he has learned about by obsessively following all kinds of tips on Facebook pages - his wife is a high school teacher who was expected to be back in the classroom even though she hadn’t been vaccinated yet, so he made it his business to find her a vaccine, and he’s more than a little neurotic about health issues anyway - always has been), and I took him up on it. But I won’t sweat it if it takes a little while.
We have such a crazy non-system that, for example, our mutual friend, who just finished her second round of chemo for breast cancer, because she lives in a town with its own health department, theoretically isn’t supposed to be able to get an appointment at her local pharmacy, but someone in her same exact medical and age group who lives five hours south in another county can get an appointment at that same pharmacy in my friend’s hometown by virtue of not living in a town with its own health department.
It makes no sense, none of it.
It could not be phrased better.
My wife has been looking into the availability of vacc in the Chicago area (59 yrs old, hypertension). Just out of curiosity, she’s been filling out forms w/ a variety of outright lies. She has not been able to identify any availability for folk under 65 if not ins some specific occupations.
The policy, the system, and the communication about it, make no sense at all. Note - wife and I are both lawyers. We are both reasonably comfortable with technology. If we can’t figure this out, what chance do less capable people have.
Yesterday Biden said end of May. OK - that is doable to me. I’m willing to patiently wait that long. But if April ends and there is no more clarity suggesting an impending vacc for me, and if I see even more and more folk no more infirm or at risk than myself getting them, I assume I’ll start being more aggressive in seeking one out. Call that line-jumping or whatever you wish. There is a limit as to how long I will patiently wait for an absolutely fucked up non-system.
Doesn’t look good here in Northern California:
Check out the Chicago Vaccine Hunters Facebook group. A very old friend of mine figured out the whole system early on (he is extremely neurotic about anything health-related, because his father got sick when he was a small child and was dead within a month, plus he is a giant germophobe). And he is a stay-at-home parent who is a huge geek and is married to a teacher who is being forced to return to in-person teaching, so he made it his mission to find her a vaccine. (She also has at least one other health risk factor that I know of.)
The way it works in Illinois right now is that Illinois has expanded to 1b+, which would include your wife (hypertension is a risk factor). The City of Chicago and Cook County have not expanded to 1b+ yet, but some private pharmacies have chosen to do so, notably Walgreens and Jewel-Osco. If she can find a pharmacy outside Chicago with available appointments, she should be able to get herself vaccinated. I looked last night and found some 1b+ slots for later this week in the Peoria area and Pekin, but I am not willing to travel that far (I’d likely have to use public restrooms, etc., which defeats the purpose). The Facebook page identifies many strategies for snagging an appointment if you are eligible - times when various pharmacies release blocks of appointments, etc. And the United Center supersite that is about to open up should relieve some of the stress on the system.
My friend has decided to be my personal vaccine fairy and try to snag me an appointment (1b+ for pulmonary condition). He has already done it for several other people, including a mutual friend of ours who has just finished her second round of chemo. We’ll see if he does, but if not, I will just wait - I think availability is about to improve shortly, by a LOT.
I think so too. After I snagged the appointment at CVS for tomorrow, I got called this evenng by a local independent pharmacy whose wait list I was on, for an opening on Saturday. (I told them about the CVS appointment, of course. I’d been going to do so in any case after I had the CVS shot safely in my arm.)
Thanks for the info. Just a crazy situation.
Given that Canada has only vaccinated 3.84% of the population in over 2 months, and that I’d be low on any priority list, I’m going to extrapolate the curve and amend my guess to sometime in 2025.
We suck.
From what I know of Illinois, private pharmacies don’t check anything. The conditions at this point are so vague that arguably anyone qualifies. What does having a “heart condition” mean? Everyone’s heart is in some kind of condition.
It’s my hope that the predictions that we’ll sooner than we can imagine be awash in vaccines in the US will not long after directly lead to us helping out neighboring countries (inc. Canada if you’re still lagging in supplies), and also not-so-neighboring in central and south America.
If you ever get the vaccines you ordered, Canada will eventually be in the same position because you ordered more per capita than even the US did…not that it’s doing you any good at the moment, sigh.
I made my prediction before the J&J vaccine.
Indiana just lowered it’s age to 50, so I am now eligible. I got an email to that effect yesterday, and immediately went to the sign-up website.
My appointment is this Sunday afternoon. I’m getting the J&J shot. My location is the brickyard! that’s fine with me, as I can walk there, but it’s funny to me that they are using it as a place for mass vaccinations.
I randomly chose 3/13 at the beginning of the thread. I got my first shot last Thursday and am booked in for my second on the 18th.of March. It came through my insurer-Kaiser Permanente. They do a wonderful job with the personnel but their building is not meant for that many people and the 6ft rule was not working. Handling befuddled old folks with cheer and kindness . I got the Pfizer dose.
Tonight I got a appointment notice for Saturday from the county website. It gave me a
date Saturday between 9-5 but did not say where the location was -which would be super important information to me. I clicked that I already had my shot and it just closed out. Didn’t ask where or what.
The county did just open a new center in an old defunct Outdoor store so I would guess that is it. I can’t imagine the chaos coming as they open up to all ages. Virginia-Prince William county.
I’ve been watching the NYT vaccine tracker, which seems to be based on this CDC data. I would basically take the total number of doses injected and divide that by two to get how many people are vaccinated. I know - there’s a heap of reasons that’s not right, but it is a reasonable first order approximate to estimate how long out until I might get vaccinated (I’m a 40s guy who can work at home and seem to have zero co-morbidities, so, yeah. Last in line.)
Anyway, seems like the J&J vaccine has blown a hole in that algorithm, and the CDC data source hasn’t adjusted. It seems like what I want to know now are two numbers: how many people are fully vaccinated (either the J&J vaccine, or both doses of Pfizer or Moderna) and how many have received only one dose of Pfizer/Moderna. Is this data available anywhere? It’s fine if it’s more granular. It’s just frustrating that I can only find more coarse data.