Not for me, but Toronto opened up vaccinations to non-assisted living 80+ seniors today. I went online at 10:30 this morning and managed to get my 83 year old mother an appointment at 11:30. She hustled herself into a cab (I wouldn’t have made it in time to pick her up) and was done by 12 when my sister picker her up. She is ecstatic since she’s been alone since my dad passed away in September.
My original estimate for my own vaccine was June and then August, but Canada is finally starting to get our act together. Due to co-morbidities I’m now eligible for a vaccine by about mid-April. My wife will probably be in June, my older daughter turns 16 in August so she should be vaccinate after her birthday. My soon-to-be teenager is obviously up in the air until they approve something for kids.
I have no way of calculating when my turn might be. I’m 64, no co-morbidities (unless you count being a bit chubbier than I ought to be), and I can work from home.
Someone on nextdoor.com from my neighborhood said that she went to a pop-up vaccination site, stated that she’d turn 65 this year, and did that qualify her? They said it did and they gave her a vaccine. I’d try too, but it’d involve taking a half day off work to find out.
Assuming you’re in the US, that seems way pessimistic. I’m also “last-in-line” by the way Washington state does its phases, and that group is only like 10% of the population, and I’m still likely to get it in May.
Regardless of what “group” you think you are part of my advice is:
Don’t just passively wait to be notified. Check out the website/information your state/county/town has on vaccinations and sites, sign up to waiting lists if they are available, sign up for notifications, and keep checking back periodically.
Try getting an appointment, regardless. My take on the ethics is that it is important to get as many vaccinated as possible in the shortest period of time. If you can get an appointment without misrepresenting the facts, then go for it.
I struggle to reconcile the TX stats with my own experience living here: less that 10% of the population is vaccinated, but nearly everyone I know who is even vaguely eligible (qualifying conditions) is vaccinated. At the end of the day, I think it must be that the circles I run in tend to be people who have a strong sense of agency: I am on a group chat of ladies at work, and between us, we hunted down every lead, read every article, forwarded every link and tweet that was even vaguely relevant–and we’ve all been vaccinated, along with any eligible family members. But I know some people at work who haven’t been, and in every case that I came across, they really hadn’t been paying attention. They didn’t realize they were eligible. They didn’t realize the county had a sign-up page, or they thought it was pointless because it would take so long as to be basically pointless, so they didn’t bother. They are apparently waiting for I don’t even know what.
I’m not saying that “anyone could get vaccinated if they wanted to”, but I am saying that having a community and a sense of agency went a long, long way for me and the people I knew. I can readily imagine a lot of people lack that.
They might have spent multiple hours one day hunting through links that kept referring them on to other links and then back to the ones they started with; filling out pages of information only in order to be told there were no appointments (but they’d had to fill out all that info before they were told that); filling out pages of information having been told first that there were appointments only to be told after all that typing that there weren’t; getting most of the way through multiple pages of filling out info only to find that on what should be close to the last page the “next” button won’t work – and won’t work in a different browser – and won’t work on a different device; answering the phone on seeing their health care provider’s office number only to be told at some length by a recording that the office is calling them just to tell them that they have no vaccine, don’t know when they will, and might or might not call again when they have any. They may simply not have time enough to keep doing that every day; many people don’t.
I don’t think it’s got to do only with sense of agency. I think a lot of it’s got to do with whether one has other things one has to do.
@MandaJo you live in the Dallas area, right? I think the numbers for the first vaccine is closer to 19% for those over 18. Add to that what you’re saying about a lot of people not paying attention, and it’s not surprising that a lot of people around you are able to get vaccinated simply because you’re able to be more proactive.
I think it’s the community thing. It’s hard faster to negotiate all that when people who already did it walk you through it and tell you what to do and what’s a waste of time and what to have ready.
That does help a great deal. I wouldn’t have had my own recent appointment if not for that – one friend who does have the time and has been dedicating herself to this called to tell me of appointments. I checked, saw no appointments available, and decided I must have just missed this week’s local allotments as they must have filled up by the time I could fill in info. Then another friend called to say his wife was signing up right then; I thought she must have gotten in just ahead of me, but then I thought the timing didn’t seem quite right, so I looked a second time and they must have just opened because every time slot was available for two days ahead, when a few minutes previously none were available at all.
– I then tried to pass it on and spent a while calling other people; though a number who I would have otherwise called weren’t eligible as the particular clinics were only for 65+. The person who called me as his wife was signing up was 64 and so not eligible for these particular clinics despite being a cancer patient.
I’m in NYC and right now the “All other people” category just says “Summer 2021.” Hopefully the J&J vaccine may be able to speed things up. I’m just thankful both my parents were able to get their first shot.
Im curious where you’re getting that information. Washington has updated its schedule ( https://www.doh.wa.gov/Portals/1/Documents/1600/coronavirus/VaccinationPhasesInfographic.pdf ), with phase 1 going out until the end of April. And that’s not “everyone in phase 1 is vaccinated by end of April”, that’s “everyone in phase 1 can begin trying to get an appointment” by end of April. And that’s just phase 1, with phases 2, 3 and 4 still being unscheduled.
I took a look at King County vaccine data ( Summary of COVID-19 vaccination among residents - King County ) and it shows 51,295 doses administered in the last week, so halve that to get about 25,000 people immunized/week. There are 1.8 million people over the age of 16 in King County, minus the 393,154 or so that have one or more doses already, that leaves about 1,461,346 people left. Divide by 25,000 per week and you get about 58 weeks just to get to the last eligible person in King County getting their shots.
Granted not everyone wants the vaccine, and you’re unlikely to be the actual absolute last person in line, but like me, if you are in phase 3 or 4, predicting that you won’t get a shot before fall seems pretty reasonable. Even if you assume the distribution rate doubles over time, that’s still 29 weeks, which puts you into the Fall. I’ve already gone through the stages of grief on this and have accepted I’m not seeing anyone for months to come.
Summit County Ohio (Akron area) had a huge kerfuffle the first days they opened up vaccines so they switched to a lottery system. I wasn’t eligible at the time of the lottery sign-ups but I signed up anyway. The governor opened up vaccines to 50+ (not me) and Type 2 diabetics (me) just the other day and today I got my email that I “won” the lottery and could sign up.
So, I’m set for next Monday at 2:30. I guessed pretty well - I’m about a month ahead of my age group, I’d reckon.
Both my parents (70 and 69) and my friends with Type 1 have had their first shots.
I live in King County, so let’s definitely use the local data. As you said, 1.8MM vaccine-eligible residents. Polls have shown about 20% of people are a hard no on getting the vaccine (let’s hope that declines!), so let’s say 1.44MM are going to try to get the vaccine, and 400k already have it. So roughly a million more King County residents are going to try to seek the vaccine when they can.
So if that’s going to happen over the next 10 weeks, that’s 100k per week. Is that feasible? Scaled up to the country as a whole, 100k / week is (US-population over king-county population times 100k), which is roughly 15 MM / week, or about double the current rate. So KC would have to quadruple its current pace, or get to double the current national pace. I’m pretty confident the nation as a whole is going to double its rate - just with the J&J vaccine coming online and the delivery promises from Pfizer and Moderna, we’re inline for that.
I’m less clear on why KC is vaccinating at half the rate of the country as a whole - maybe younger demographics? - but I also assume that won’t persist forever.
This is all back-of-the-napkin level math. Let me know if you think I’m way off base, but it’s admittedly a lot of guesswork.
In other news, Washington’s DOH is supposed to start showing breakout data about the J&J (one-shot) vaccine tomorrow, so hopefully that’ll give some more insight.
Remember that no vaccine is yet approved for the under-16 crowd, and only Pfizer is approved for 16-18 year-olds. So that’s a pretty big chunk of people who aren’t yet in line.