I received my first dose of the Moderna covid-19 vaccine yesterday. I’m incredibly grateful and find my free-floating anxiety much relieved. I have an appointment for the second dose. No more reaction than a sore arm so far.
But the method of getting it leaves much to be desired.
New Mexico has a vaccine registration website. If you’re in New Mexico and you haven’t signed up yet, do it now. I’ll wait.
I signed up early and got replies via email and text that I was registered, with my registration number. They added some things to the website and said if you didn’t fill them all out (not onerous), you wouldn’t be contacted. Fortunately, I kept checking and updated my registration.
And then I heard nothing. The state told local media that Group 1A, medical personnel and people in congregate living situations, were completed in early January. But I talked to a friend in a retirement community shortly after that, and she was just about to get her shot the next day.
Further, they were moving on to Group 1B, which should include me. But no notification. I complained on Twitter to tweets from Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham and the New Mexico Department of Health. Letters to the editor from others in Group 1B started appearing in the Santa Fe New Mexican. The New Mexican ran a couple of stories about groups received their vaccine seemingly out of the stated order. They were deserving people – one group that feeds the homeless and teachers. Hard to disagree that they should get the vaccine.
The problem was the seeming disconnect between what we read or heard in the news and what we saw happening. Notification through the registration system what group we were in and an approximate date we might get the vaccine might have helped. But nada. I began to wonder if the registration meant anything at all.
Out of the blue, on Saturday night, I received a text and an email. I could sign up for an appointment! I ran to the computer and got my second choice of time, my priority criterion being AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. That was yesterday at noon.
Snow complicated my plans. I shoveled the driveway, and by eleven it and the uphill road out of my neighborhood were clear.
I expected to see something out of my childhood, updated. Entry personnel with computers to check my registration and appointment numbers. A socially-distanced line of seniors. Multiple vaccination stations, with personnel ready to inject. An area of socially-distanced chairs in which to wait to see whether there would be a reaction. I wondered where that would be at the supermarket, but maybe they had a large back room for meetings and such.
When I arrived, I looked for signs directing me to the vaccination area, but they weren’t there. The man cleaning carts told me it was at the pharmacy, down thataway.
That was it. The usual pharmacy area, enhanced with four chairs for making out the paperwork and sitting afterwards. The usual pharmacy staff, two people behind the counter that I could see, were doing their usual things, plus checking appointment numbers and handing out the paperwork that asked the same questions I had answered on the website. The signatures and paper were probably to absolve the supermarket of responsibility.
The tech called me to the back room and administered the shot. Yay!
There were about four or five of us. Four or five per half-hour. Any more throughput would have required more personnel. I think vaccinations were available for eight hours. That’s eighty people a day.
The population of Santa Fe is 84,000. The surrounding rural areas add up to 100,000. At eighty a day, that will take 1,050 days to vaccinate all of Santa Fe, more to include the surrounding areas. That’s three years. Let’s say that there were three vaccination clinics yesterday in Santa Fe – the state isn’t telling us how many there are. That’s still a year to go. And we don’t know whether the supply of vaccine will be there. Yesterday the Biden team said they didn’t know how much vaccine they had.
Joe Biden has brought a capable team in to manage the response to the pandemic. Because the Trump team would not cooperate during the transition, they are playing catch-up. Biden plans to use FEMA for the kind of vaccine clinic I was expecting to find. FEMA sounds enthusiastic about the assignment. The states depend on the feds for supply and information, both of which have been disappointing.
Delays are baked into the system, but let’s hope things speed up in the next few weeks.
dmsilev
Congrats on the jab!
There’s a bit of improvement in supply expected for next week:
White House expected to tell governors they will get more coronavirus vaccine doses starting next week
I think the target production rate, Pfizer and Moderna combined, is 2 million doses a day. So there’s still room to grow. Also, J&J is expected to announce the results of their trial within about a week.
Edit. I just have to reproduce the highest-rated comment on that story:
Emphasis added. That one’s a keeper.
Dorothy A. Winsor
The expectation you had describes exactly the situation at the hospital where I got my first shot last week.
But Trump screwed this up as much as possible given the skill of the scientists who, luckily, did not work for him
guachi
I’m in the military. Many of us got shot one last week. Relatively efficient as the military is pretty good at giving people shots. Then they ran out. Cancelled for everyone else. Oh, well.
Doc Sardonic
Have no clue when or if I will ever be able to get vaccinated in the wonderful state of Florida. Although I am liking the Biden administration’s handling of things thus far. I really appreciated the new press secretary’s bitch slapping of our shithead governor after he popped off about not needing FEMA to assist.
Hildebrand
My wife and I received our first dose yesterday in Detroit. The City of Detroit has a great system set-up: You make an appointment, get scheduled, then do this through a drive-through clinic they set up in the parking garage of the TCF Center downtown. You pull in, are checked in, fill out paperwork, they mark on your car your number, you pull through, wait a bit, get into line (still in your car), they come to you, check your paperwork, ask a few questions, and they give you the vaccine. They have you wait 15 mins, come back, check on you, and if you aren’t having any adverse reactions, off you go. (They have a place for folks with allergic reactions.)
The whole thing took 65 minutes – from pulling into the line to leaving.
They were processing 8 lines of 6 cars every 20-25 minutes. Most cars had two people
edit: Actually, it was 16 lines – they sent us into two directions at one point.
patrick II
DeSantis and Florida:
From How to Screw up a Pandemic” at Raw Story
aliasofwestgate
Depending on how fast things are ramped up, i expect to be vaccinated in 4 to 6 weeks. But the missing doses i highly suspect were spirited away by the Trump Admin/traitor tots/grifters before Biden took over. You don’t just ‘lose’ vaccines like that. As a pharm tech, shipping was tracked every step of the way on all medications including when they were dispensed! Vaccines included. So that issue, i think will come to light in a few days to possibly a few weeks. For now? It’s just the waiting period while they take stock of the situation and get things moving at actual full speed, and organized. Not a small task, but it can be done. It also can be done fairly quickly with a competent admin, which we now have.
rivers
I just got my first shot yesterday. I agree that figuring out what to do after having registered on the NJ State site several weeks ago was not clear. However, our councilman sends out an e-mail regularly and he suggested that over 65’s call the Senior Services number at City Hall. I left a message, they returned it three days later and three days after that I got my shot, so I count that as pretty efficient. The actual process at a local community center was very well organized and everyone was super nice. I’m now signed onto a vaccine app they gave me and I can report symptoms if I have any. ( I don’t.) So, so far, so good. I think that the problem– apart from how many vaccines the states get – is the confusion around how to get an appointment in the first place.
lofgren
What makes you think there were only three? For all you know there were 25. If all you need is a pharmacy and four chairs, there could have been dozens.
A lot of your complaint seems to come down to the government not texting you enough to keep you posted on their progress. Are you saying that media reports were false? Or just that the governor did not respond to your @ tweets?
A lot of this just sounds like that free-floating anxiety. You have no idea if the throughput at the clinic was the same during the entire 8 hours, or just slow while you were there. You have no idea how many clinics there are. You’re skeptical of media reports on Santa Fe’s progress because you weren’t personally updated by text or tweet, but actually your vaccination window seems to have fallen during the 1b period just as predicted. The three year estimate, itself based on dubious assumptions, assumes that vaccine delivery will remain stable over time which seems like a highly unlikely scenario. Delivery will likely fluctuate based on which segment of the populations is getting vaccinated, vaccine availability, and like a dozen other factors that I don’t even know about.
Take a deep breath. The vaccination plan is obviously very faulty, but you have no idea if it is faulty in the way that you describe because everything here is speculation based on fear.
Betty Cracker
@Doc Sardonic: Same boat here. I too cheered when Jen Psaki flattened Gov. Slabhead!
We live in the boonies some 100 miles north of Tampa, and the vaccine rollout has been an absolute clusterfuck up here. In my county, a recent vaccine cattle call had hundreds of seniors driving around in the pre-dawn darkness trying to figure out where to line up for their shots. Some got them. Hundreds waited hours and did not get them.
My 81-year-old mother-in-law lives in a retirement community not far from The Villages. She has no idea when she’ll get a vaccination. Ditto my father, aunts and uncles, some of whom are in high-risk groups in addition to being over 70. Sorta looks like decades of Republican govs defunding public health has a downside.
On the positive side of the ledger, my sister (a nurse-anesthetist) and SIL (an ER doc) both got both of their shots.
Keith P.
I tried last week and this week, but all three hubs in my county weren’t taking requests for appointments. I’m pretty pissed off about it, TBH…by the time they take appointments again, I expect them to already be onto the next phase, jacking up demand that much more. And the whole line situation *really* sets me off, because we, as a whole, have been getting progressively more conditioned to accept waiting in insane lines – and why not, you have a good chance of getting interviewed on the news if you’ve camped out somewhere for 12 hours to get
BBQ Movie Tickets groceriesa vaccine.Felanius Kootea
Congratulations on getting the first shot of the vaccine.
Cheryl Rofer
@lofgren: Golly, a long-distance psychiatrist right here on our very own almost-top-ten-thousand blog!
I try not to pie people, but you are making that very difficult.
Sister Golden Bear
OT: But I just wanted to give my thanks to everyone who voiced support in yesterday afternoon’s thread. As mentioned, I wasn’t on BJ much yesterday, so I wasn’t able to reply in time to the thread itself
Unfortunately, Republican attacks to deny healthcare to trans kids are underway in multiple states. So the fight is far from over.
germy
https://variety.com/2021/film/news/covid-vaccine-hollywood-skipping-line-1234891647/
soup time
I got my jab last Saturday, and it was an entirely different experience than Cheryl’s.
First, email notification and a unique link for the scheduling website. They were set up to process 20 patients every 15 minutes, from 6am to 5pm, that’s 880 people/day, three days a week. Arrived at the hospital in Olympia to see a line of people outside the entrance. LOTS of signage with arrows where to line up, where to go next. Three staff checking names on a list prior to entry, then follow signs. Fill in a short form, wait for another staff to admit you to the jab room where there were 8 nurses/pharmacists doing the jabs, two more loading syringes. Then to a waiting room for 15 minutes observation, staffed with more nurses. About 20 staff at hospital working the operation. Very well coordinated.
Annie
Ha! I registered in San Francisco, got a notice that I was eligible since I am 65 and I should call my doctor for an appointment. Doctor’s office voicemail says they don’t have the vaccine. Back to the San Francisco Department of Public Health site which says all allotted doses of vaccine have been administered.
I will check again today.
but the system is absurd. I’m eligible because of age. But I work mostly at home and only go out for work (one day per week), grocery store once a week, and walks. I should not be in line for vaccination ahead of the 24-year-old who checks out my groceries, or my 30 year old neighbor who’s a teacher. No one has asked about any of those things.
randy khan
Experiences vary widely across the country because the states have almost no guidance on what they ought to do. As a result, they’re all improvising, and some are doing it better than others.
The good news is that we now have people who understand logistics and transparency in charge of the situation, so things should get better. The real question is how fast they can ramp up production and distribution plans.
Cheryl Rofer
I’m glad to hear that other states are doing better. My sense has been that New Mexico is somewhere in the middle of things – not the best, but not the worst.
trollhattan
Congrats Cheryl, every jab is cause for a celebration. Can’t wait for mine (registered with the county and nothing back yet, at all).
Does anybody know the potential impact of EU threatening vaccine export restrictions? e.g., one of Pfizer’s big plants is in Belgium.
aliasofwestgate
@randy khan: Conservative estimate is a month at the very least, possibly more if they run into issues along the way. That’s to at least get the whole thing running at a decent speed. I’m just glad that things are moving even now, as they evaluate and start getting things in place as we speak.
randy khan
@Annie:
At the fine-grained level you describe, you’re right that you shouldn’t get the vaccine sooner than the people you mention. But this kind of thing always is done in broad strokes because it’s logistically too complicated to make those fine distinctions. Heck, I signed up for notifications from the Virginia vaccine site, which used fairly broad categories, and it still had much more detail than you’d like for that kind of thing. Big, simple categories that people can understand are the way to go.
jonas
NY is a clusterfuck stepping repeatedly on rakes made of more clusterfuck. Not only have most counties run out of vaccine, the other day I got a confirmation for a shot at a state site only to turn up and be told that due to a database error or something, several thousand “fake appointments” had been made erroneously (including mine) and they stuck me on a waiting list. In the meantime, of course, there are no other appointments available anywhere else that’s allowed to vaccinate my cohort. Grrr.
I thought Biden was going to use the DPA to boost vaccine production. Where does that stand?
chopper
for my signup it was simpler as to the first dose, but as to the second it was not. unlike my wife, i wasn’t able to sign up for both on the same visit to the website (different entity administering the vaccine). so i worried, given all these stories about people in some other states not being able to get signed up for their second shot due to all manner of issues.
emails to the hospital sign-up system didn’t go anywhere, and i had to look around for some time until i luckily stumbled onto what looked like a page where i could attempt to sign up for the second dose, but it said they weren’t opening up appointments yet. kept retrying every morning until a few days ago the results up and changed, but there were already almost no slots left in the ~28 day window. nabbed one, but only b/c i had been trying over and over again.
can’t imagine how this is working for people who are not at all tech savvy.
germy
I wonder if this will be a yearly thing, getting vaccinated against COVID, the same way we get our yearly flu shot
I like to think it’ll be a one time (two-dose) deal, and then we can all forget about it and return to normal. But I really don’t know.
Doc Sardonic
@Betty Cracker: I live in the non-Villages area on the Lake-Orange border and our initial shipment of vaccines was 3000 doses, barely enough to cover healthcare workers, let alone the Village people. Hope those folks are getting good and pissed off about it.
germy
@chopper:
More proof that internet access is not a luxury or hobby, but a necessity, and should be treated as an affordable public utility.
JillR
Delurking to say, my patients and friends (in Santa Fe) have told me of at least 5 vaccination sites, including Santa Fe High School, where they have several “bays” to give shots in. I agree that it seems somewhat disorganized, though I think that is partly due to supply problems- apparently, like other states, NM is not getting as many vaccines as they had been told.
Scout211
The process here in California is frustrating, to say the least. The fact that it is all set up by county makes it uneven and very confusing. Our county is rural, so our population is low compared to other counties and the number of health care workers and first responders is lower as well. So there were fewer doses given to our county in the 1a group. Now that they are starting 1b and we both qualify in that group. Our older population is actually a fairly high percentage of the population. But currently, they are out of doses.
The county has a partnership with Dignity Health Hospital to distribute the vaccinations. The system to sign up is a . . . phone number. You leave your name, date of birth and phone number on a voice mail. Within the first few days of the phone number being set up, they had 10,000 calls. So that means that when they get the next delivery of doses, each and every one of those 10,000+ residents will need to be called back to make an appointment. Does this even seem viable? A staff of hundreds on the phones? Huh?
I get why they decided on a phone number. Many residents don’t have internet and those over 65 often cannot navigate an online sign-up system. But 10,000+ call-backs??? That doesn’t seem very efficient to me.
So we wait.
ColoradoGuy
I got my first vaccine (Moderna) on the 21st, through a local grocery chain. Thought it would be at a hospital, but nope, just a little room at the in-store pharmacy. First time we had been in any store since March 5th, so Ms Colorado and I wore a double-mask. Felt very weird walking into the store and filling out paper forms with the same questions as the on-line forms, but with a signature this time. Made sure to wash hands very thoroughly when we got home, and discard and wash clothes, as well.
The shot was nothing, couldn’t even feel it. Didn’t even know I had it until the bandage went on. No reason for shot anxiety, nothing to feel or get worried about.
But we both what seemed a weird flu for about 36 hours afterward, achy muscles, odd skin sensations, fatigue, and in my case, chills a few times. Hot baths and 2 grams of Vitamin C seemed to resolve it. Other folks we knew who got it had no reaction at all, aside from the expected sore arm.
48 hours later, l was actually quite a bit more energized than usual. Maybe it was the lifting of nearly a year of anxiety, and the sureness of the knowledge that once this takes hold, even if we get sick, we will not end up in the hospital. Still wear a double mask, of course, but it feels like there’s a safety net for the first time.
The Moar You Know
Were I Joe Biden, and thank God I am not, I would have said that question needs to be resolved by close of business today. And it does.
chopper
i will say tho, the process at the clinic for my first dose was fantastic. the line was long but it moved super fast, stopping at several points along the way; first a temp check and OK sticker, then a room full of desks to look up your info, then a line into a big ballroom being repurposed for tons of vaccinations. from the point i entered i was shepherded the whole way by a bunch of volunteers, and from the door to the point where i got the shot it was less than 10 minutes.
well designed and the volunteers really made it quick and efficient. a model for how it should be done.
Cameron
Florida is a mess; the Trump mini-me pretending to be governor has the essential Trumpian qualities of dishonesty and incompetence, although Manatee County seems to be doing the best it can. I’m probably going to be late to the game although I’m almost 70 and have COPD, since they’re handling everything through a lottery system and have one drive-through site. Since I don’t have a car and live pretty far away, I’ll cool my heels. It is getting a bit much to hide all the time, though.
germy
@jonas:
ALBANY — As of midday Monday, 91% of the first-dose COVID vaccine shipped to New York state has been injected into people’s arms, official state data indicated.
With the ongoing shortage of vaccine, and the sometimes chaotic or random nature of its distribution, some people are worried that the second part of the two-shot vaccine won’t be available when they are due to receive it. Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at a news conference that the fear is unfounded.
“You will get that second dose. The federal government protects that second-dose allocation,” he said.
Cuomo offered no assurance that the availability of first doses would get better anytime soon, though. The number of doses supplied by the feds varies without warning from week to week, he said — “There’s no operational intelligence on this.”
The state, meanwhile, has opened 3,000 distribution sites, a number far too great to fully supply.
A sign of hope: The Biden administration plans to at least provide accurate predictions of the flow of doses to the state, Cuomo said, so they can better plan for its use.
https://dailygazette.com/2021/01/25/second-dose-covid-vaccine-supply-safe-cuomo-says-even-as-first-dose-supply-inadequate/
gwangung
@germy:
Personally, jab and forget was lost the minute the anti-maskers and the Republican clods got any sway. The reservoir of active infection (and idiocy) was way too large for variants not to emerge.
aliasofwestgate
@jonas: He already signed the order for the DPA to be implemented. So it’s still going to take time to get that going. Nothing will be immediately felt, of course. Vaccines being the thing that will take the longest time to get moving on and made. But the rest of the equipment needed and finding and training up vaccinators? They’re likely working on that right now. The process takes a bit but is far from instant. My guess is by mid to late February we’ll see things begin to speed up pretty quickly. *grins
dmsilev
So, some back-of-the-envelope estimates. Pfizer and Moderna total have contracted to supply 400 million doses (200 million people) by July. Johnson and Johnson has contracted to supply 100 million doses over the same period. Assuming that their single-dose regimen is effective, that pretty much gets us to all adults in the US. If J&J ends up needing to use a 2-dose regimen (they have a second trial going on that regimen), we’re still at 250 million by the summer. Novavax is in late trials, contracted to supply 110 million doses by the summer (55 million people). Bottom line, we should be in good shape by June/July if there aren’t any major snags.
Astra Zeneca, who the hell knows. But if their second trial works out, they have a lot of potential capacity.
Cheryl Rofer
@JillR: That’s good news. I wish the state would tell us that.
CindyH
@germy: I’m expecting that variants will require periodic boosters and likely to be yearly. Just my guess.
trollhattan
@Doc Sardonic:
“A-right, I want the Indians lined up here, firemen here, construction workers, y’all come back Thursday.”
germy
@chopper:
Did they give you a printed form that you can use to prove you’ve been vaccinated?
germy
@CindyH:
That’s my guess, also.
Keith P.
@gwangung: Ding ding ding! I’m actually curious who the first major name will be who dares mention “endemic”, which is where we’re heading.
Anotherlurker
@Annie: I applied to Contra Costa County Health Services several weeks ago, for the Vaccine. I am over 65 . I received an email from them, yesterday, saying they are still reviewing my application. ???
I don’t understand this answer.
My best guess is that they are swamped and behind on the applications. However, if that is the case, why didn’t they just say that?
I curse tru*p and all Republicans, daily.
trollhattan
@chopper:
Sounds well thought out.
I’m feeling like this is not going to be a once-a-century event and what we’re learning from COVID-19 will be put into use again in our lifetimes. Maybe my guppy’s lifetime.
trollhattan
@Anotherlurker:
“Do they really exist? What do we think?”
White & Gold Purgatorian
Glad you were able to get a shot! My mom is scheduled to get her first shot this weekend and also has an appointment for the second. We were never able to get through on the Alabama Dept. of Health “vaccination hotline,” but our local hospital opened up an online registration for anyone currently eligible. They called her pretty promptly to schedule. The hospital is aiming to vaccinate 500 people a day this week, 7 days, and hopes to increase that to 1000 per day next week. Unlike the health department, they seem to have their shit together.
I was a bit concerned that GOP run states might try to slow walk vaccine distribution so Biden would miss his 100 million in the first 100 days goal, but there is no sign of that here. The initial rollout was so slow that the governor and the health department got a huge amount of flak for being dead last in % of residents vaccinated. Then the Trump administration announced they were going to stop shipping vaccine to states who aren’t using it fast enough. That seems to have lit a fire under several Republicans in the state leg. who are now leaning on the health department to vaccinate more, and faster. So, I’m hopeful that things are going to pick up here, even after this slow start.
And, of course, I’m beyond relieved that my mom should be fully immunized in time for her 93rd birthday. We locked down right around her birthday last year and she has barely left home since.
The Moar You Know
@Scout211: I didn’t know that the state is letting counties take the wheel, and it’s good to know (it’s a fucking horrible idea, county government in CA is the absolute worst) because my county (San Diego) just changed their guidelines day before yesterday to something quite different than what the state has recommended. To say that this is a clusterfuck is underrating the situation if anything. This effort needs to be nationalized. Now.
oldster
“I expected to see something out of my childhood, updated. Entry personnel with computers to check my registration and appointment numbers. A socially-distanced line of seniors. Multiple vaccination stations, with personnel ready to inject. An area of socially-distanced chairs in which to wait to see whether there would be a reaction. I wondered where that would be at the supermarket, but maybe they had a large back room for meetings and such.”
I got my first shot last week at SUNY Potsdam — way northern NYS, up near the Canadian border — and it looked like exactly what you expected. They have a big gym all laid out as you hoped, and they are delivering over 500 shots per day.
They also had about 20 people in uniform from the 10th Mountain Division, since Ft. Drum is just down the pike. They were helping in all sorts of low-level ways — taking names, walking people to their seats, etc..
I found it very inspiring: this is how I want my nation to react in a crisis. It’s a damned shame that Trump wasted the first year in denial, and poisoned the well of public opinion.
gwangung
@trollhattan: We ALREADY learned a great deal of what we needed to learn. It’s that Republicans (and not just Trump) threw it all away.
patrick II
My 64 year-old brother was visiting his doctor at the VA clinic last week. The nurse asked if he wanted a COVID shot. Sure! So he got is first shot and is scheduled for his second next week. Eight people did not show up for their appointments, so rather than waste them they gave them to whomever was nearby.
He called me and suggested that I hang out at the local VA clinic in late afternoons.
WaterGirl
@Cheryl Rofer: @soup time:
soup time, what you are describing sounds great. The process Cheryl described was pathetic and ineffective, at best.
With the new administration, hopefully we will see much more of the former and much less of the latter.
Like everything else with COVID, it’s the lag time that gets us.
Barbara
To simplify the appointment process you would have to simplify how those who get appointments are chosen. If you are determined to use 100% of the current supply to meet the needs of those who are first in line, you will need to spend significant effort, which includes time and red tape, to identify, locate and schedule those people.
You can use proxy factors once you have gone through the low hanging fruit (a bunch of highly eligible people in one place — nursing home residents and health care workers), but you will risk putting some less “worthy” recipients in front of others who should have gone sooner. If you set up a tent in a hard hit zip code and let anyone walk in, it could be that only 50% of those who get the vaccine will be in a priority group, but you will vaccinate a lot of people. This is a conundrum, but as more high risk people do get vaccinated, it matters less and less that we stick to a strict policy of vaccinating based on perceived need. Even those who need it less come into contact with those who need it more.
mrmoshpotato
@jonas:
I assume these rakes are durable. Good for clearing sewer grates, raking up tons of grass clippings, etc. ?
zhena gogolia
Connecticut is a mess. I don’t expect to get mine until April at best.
trollhattan
@gwangung:
Oh yes, a good deal was learned from SARS and ebola, and this time we’ve had to take it far, far further from lockdowns to restructuring school and businesses to putting hospitals into full triage mode to rapid test and vaccine development and now, to mass inoculations.
Had Trump applied the Obama pandemic plan the US might not be doing what we are today, but many other nations would have fallen prey to COVID regardless.
trollhattan
@mrmoshpotato:
Forest rakes are the best rakes.
Another Scott
Yay! Thanks for the report on your success.
My step-mom in MS had an appointment to get the first shot on 1/29 but somehow it got moved up to 1/13. Her next is scheduled for 2/10. (Moderna).
I see that the country is “already” doing over 1 M shots a day and that’s “great”. But as you outline people need to look at the numbers in context. The country needs roughly 600 M shots (population minus youngsters (still not approved for them yet, right?) x 2). 600/365 = 20 months to cover everyone eligible in the USA if the rate is 1 M/day.
They need to ramp up well beyond 1 M/day. Biden’s people understand that – that’s why they’re getting the Defense Production Act involved. I wish that the reporters understood that too. Too much of the reporting seems to push a narrative that as long as 100 M shots are given by April 15 then everything will be normal again. It won’t. And the population needs to be prepared…
And, as AL’s COVID roundup said, the vaccine isn’t what’s going to save us. Knocking down transmission and infection is what’s going to save us. Vaccines are a tool in that process, but only one of many important tools (distancing, masks, testing and tracing, quarantine and isolation)…
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
citizen dave
@White & Gold Purgatorian: “I was a bit concerned that GOP run states might try to slow walk vaccine distribution so Biden would miss his 100 million in the first 100 days goal, ”
I understand the concern because Republicans, but it doesn’t seem to be happening in Indiana. Getting over this ASAP means getting the economy back to “normal”, and all governors want that. Plus we want to host the nation’s sportsball tournament in 7 weeks.
My city opened a new vaccination site in a former grocery store that has capacity for 1600 shots per day. Indiana has been saying the next wave is age 60-69, but Friday the gov. said it would 65-69, so I don’t know which. State website still has the 60-69 tab, ready to be lit up
I look from the wings at the play you are staging
While my guitar gently weeps
As I’m sitting here, doing nothing but aging
Still my guitar gently weeps
ColoradoGuy
As long as China has a middle class that can afford to fly around the world, a liking for imported wild animals as exotic food sources and use in “traditional medicine”, combined with a Communist Party that likes to cover things up a long as it can, we’ll get more of these outbreaks. Guaranteed. Since there’s nothing we can do about these three factors, the world needs a system to shut down international air travel within hours of a detected outbreak, since that has been the vector that spread it around the world with frightening speed.
Lapassionara
Missouri is officially last in the getting people vaccinated department. I have friends in my tier (75+) who have gotten their first shot already. They are in Tennessee, South Carolina, Texas, and Arizona, so it is not just that the state has conservative government. It is some kind of special stupidity. I fear even Biden will not be able to improve my chances of getting a jab in the near future.
Ruckus
The VA is only giving shots at the hospitals, because of the storage requirements. And there are not a lot of hospitals. All of SoCal has 3, from the Mexican border to north of Santa Barbara. I live in the LA area and I’m 43 miles away. I’m getting the Pfizer on Friday. They only stab in groups of 6 and will take walk ins, you have to be a registered/credentialed vet, in groups of six so a walk in may have a wait just sitting around.
We have, in the southern CA area, pharmacies that are supposed to be starting giving vaccinations. You can sign up now, vaccinations supposed to start in Feb at CVS/Walgreens.
CindyH
My sister is in PA (I’m in NC) – she has her first vaccine scheduled for March 8th – has to travel 2 hours to get it, even though she lives just outside of Philadelphia. That seems like a long wait, but considering it was less than a year ago that we went to lockdown, it’s pretty amazing that we have a vaccine in a year’s time.
I am hopeful that the Biden team will get things going more smoothly, and sooner.
I’m only 63, so I’m in the phase of “everyone else” here in NC. I’d rather my daughter get it before me before she starts college next fall.
Just Chuck
We’re still recovering from the war that was waged against this country for the last four years.
We have the enemy on the run, but the war isn’t over yet.
Served
One of the biggest disappointments is seeing our long-time abysmal approach to public services/goods being applied here. A lot of officials are more concerned with walling off the “undeserving” than the actual administration of the vaccine.
The NYC labyrinth process for the first tier that required a 51-question form that had tons of server errors, required text messaging to confirm and register, etc. Cuomo’s threats of fines and action against people outside the first tier getting shots, even if it meant wasting doses.
The Walgreens/CVS public-private distribution partnerships in nursing homes have been catastrophic in multiple states (Illinois and Florida come to mind).
Hopefully the National Guard mobilizing is able to get this rolling, and a predictable supply chain is now established, so our government can start doing its job.
Barbara
@trollhattan: The countries that really deserve credit for being able to marshal limited resources to resounding effect are Vietnam, Cambodia, Taiwan and Korea. On the other side of the ledger sit Sweden and the U.S. Just mind bogglingly abysmal responses compared to the resources that were available to cope with the issue.
The bigger and more diverse the country is, the harder it is to find unity of purpose and balance competing needs. However, had we tried, I think we might have been able to achieve results comparable to Germany, but it is hard for me to imagine that we ever could have matched Australia.
germy
Yes. I personally find the wet markets disgusting, but it’s a touchy subject; a cultural thing we’re not supposed to criticize.
I wasn’t surprised when Italy was hit hard by the virus. My wife and I visited that country in 2015, and saw crowds of Chinese tourists with selfie sticks. Any popular tourist destination will be vulnerable.
Soprano2
Evidently Missouri ranks dead last on our vaccine distribution so far, but we have a Trumpy governor who has exhibited almost zero leadership on COVID, so I’m not at all surprised. As a wastewater worker for the government I’ve been told that I’m in Group 2 Tier 3, whatever that means. We got a survey from the city a couple of days ago that was trying to find out how eager you are to be vaccinated (yesterday! Can it be yesterday?), and what questions you have about the vaccine and the process. I figure that eventually the city will have a shot clinic for the vaccine, just like they do for the flu vaccine. Since I had COVID in December, I figure I’m decently OK for a few months, so others should go first.
I’m going to donate convalescent plasma tomorrow, I’ll let you know how it goes. I haven’t donated blood since I was in my 20’s, because the last time I did it I almost passed out, and they told me to quit doing it. I think the plasma thing is different, though – I guess I’ll find out tomorrow! I figure at least something good should come out of me getting sick.
Barbara
@Served: See my comment above. A determination to serve need above all means your response will be slower and resources will be wasted on finding the “right” people.
chopper
@germy:
yes. it’s a CDC covid vaccination card. need to bring it for the second dose so they can check it and add another sticker.
germy
@chopper:
Good. After your second shot, it’s a valuable document.
EDIT:
After writing that, I remembered all the anti-maskers who forged medical forms claiming they were exempt from mask wearing. I wonder if anti-vaxers will forge documents “proving” they were vaccinated…
MomSense
Hope they also ramp up syringe production.
Soprano2
I saw a story about a doctor who administered some doses to people who weren’t in the first group, because he had done everyone at that location in the first group who wanted it and he didn’t want the doses to go to waste. He was fired and they tried to prosecute him!! Luckily, sanity prevailed, and the charges were dropped. That’s just stone-cold stupidity, everyone who can needs to get it eventually, so no doses should go to waste until they absolutely can’t help it.
Faithful Lurker
@Hildebrand: That was almost the exact same experience we, my husband and I, here in Port Townsend WA. We made an appointment (was extremely fortunate to get the same times), drove to our local small hospital, got in line in our car with our paper work, number on the car, etc. The shots were administered as we sat in the car, he in his left arm, me in my right, drove to a parking place, waited 15 minutes and came home. They gave out shots for 2 days from 8a.m. to 6 p.m and now they have to wait for more vaccine. Our county, Jefferson, has the largest elderly population in the state. I hope there will be enough to have our second shots in 2 weeks.
trollhattan
O/T Odds of this not happening approached 0. And now it has.
She can look wide-eyed while Tucker squints.
Sure Lurkalot
Colorado is still at 70 years and older for registration. I have no idea when that will change.
My brother called me yesterday when he was in a car line for his shot in Dallas Metro area. He also mentioned his wife started not feeling well over the weekend with sinus issues and fever…she has since tested positive. So far my brother has no symptoms himself and as far as I know, neither do his adult children who they have been seeing since the get go.
A good friend has a sister with Down’s who lives in a group home in Denver metro. The residents were scheduled for their shots yesterday. Her sister tested positive last Friday.
These scenarios scare the crap out of me.
Barbara
@Soprano2: Right. Nobody is undeserving. Everyone deserves to get vaccinated. We should try to vaccinate people in higher risk groups first but at some point making that goal unassailable becomes counterproductive. When throwing away vaccine is the alternative, I think that point has been reached.
Sister Golden Bear
@germy: Second vaccination paperwork definitely will be an important document. So I’d highly recommend scanning it, and/or taking a photo of it, so one has a electronic copy as a back up.
germy
@trollhattan:
So she’s going back where she came from
I know everyone was making jokes a few weeks ago about these people being “unemployable” but there’s always plenty of wingnut welfare. Fox shows, “think” tanks, podcasts, patreons, etc.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Barbara: I’m not sure about limited resources with respect to South Korea and Taiwan, their GDP is pretty close to the UK and Germany.
Barbara
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I guess that makes Cambodia and Vietnam the true stars.
The Moar You Know
@germy: if you can criticize a Confederate flag, you damn well can criticize the wet markets. They’re both “cultural” and they’re both wrong.
FWIW, back in the late 1990s San Francisco had small versions of the wet markets in the several Chinatown areas (there’s more than one). They’d been there for a while, several decades. The city banned them all, no apologies.
Roger Moore
I got my first shot on the 10th, and I’m scheduled to get my second this Saturday. I’m lucky that I was able to get mine through my employer, a healthcare provider, though I think they cheated the rules to get us vaccinated. I was classified as a laboratory worker, but I think that’s supposed to be for people in clinical labs, not research labs doing stuff not directly related to COVID. On the other hand, California is doing terribly at getting people vaccinated, so we should probably be happy the doses aren’t just sitting in a freezer waiting for the state to get its act together.
Starboard Tack
@ColoradoGuy:
My PCP is with UCHealth (it’s a conglomerate health care provider in Denver and the Front Range). I called their office soon after New Year’s and they said to wait a bit while they figured it out. A week or so later I got an email saying appointments were availabe. The portal had a list of openings for both the first and second doses. I thought about passing in favor of someone who has more exposure or more health problems, but I figured taking care of my health was also socially responsible. The clinic is at the auditorium in University Hospital on the Anschutz Campus. Long line to get in but overall it took maybe an hour. Colorado is doing better than most and Gov Polis is emphasizing outreach to people who don’t have or use regular health care. Second dose of Pfizer in a week.
Miss Bianca
In my rural CO county, I signed up online through the county website. There was also a hotline number to call at Public Health. Signed up, about a week or so later got both an email from the OEM (Office of Emergency Management) Director, and *then* a call from Public Health, to say I was on the list and would be notified when shots were available. (I barely squeak into the state’s 1B category because I am arguably a “frontline journalist”.) We’ll see what happens! But I know folks who have gotten their first jabs.
Demand has been *huge* in the county, despite how batshit red/Trumpy we are – I figured with the amount of out-and-proud mask denialism we had, we’d have more people refusing the vaccination, but such seems not to be the case. Good sign, actually, as far as I’m concerned.
germy
Good. They’re harmful.
I got criticized for saying that once. The argument I got back was that U.S. factory farming is just as cruel and disgusting, and that wet markets are no different than our farmer’s market. The implication was that I was being racist for criticizing the wet markets.
Ruckus
@Barbara:
A quick read of your post shows me an issue.
And that is voluntary inoculation rather than mandatory. Of course there are other issues, trump being the biggest roadblock. His non existent immunization anything program, county health system responsibility for delivery, under state health systems, a mostly seemingly non existent vaccine supply system or at least deliverable supplies, has screwed up just about every step of the process.
Seems that a lot of people are deciding not getting a shot, be it politics or whatever. I saw no one at the VA hospital a week and a half ago waiting for a shot. They had vaccines, chairs in a line for those actually getting a shot and not one person in them the 3 times I was there. Of course they were only doing 75 yrs old and above, with no feedback about how many might actually get the shot or how to get the shot, even though the VA website has a Covid section, it is woefully out of step/information. And that is not just the VA, that is every segment of this mess that shitforbrains and his cronies left when we booted his dumb ass.
It will get sorted out, it has obviously started working in many/most parts of the country, but the time lost, the effort wasted, the lives affected and lost, that is all on shitforbrains and the rethuglican party. And we should never, ever let them forget that.
WaterGirl
@jonas: I would like to take this opportunity to remind you of something that took me aback as I was watching yesterday’s press briefing a few minutes ago.
This is Jan 25. Biden has been president for 5 days. Let’s give him at least another 45 minutes before we’re critical that he hasn’t been able to turn the ship around. :-)
dexwood
@Cheryl Rofer: The vaccine supply problem in NM was spotlighted in local stories I saw on two different stations in Albuquerque yesterday. We have approximately 800,000 residents in groups 1A and 1B eligible for vaccines at the moment, yet we are only getting 25.000 doses per week supplied to us. It’s the reason the shot clinics for teachers in Albuquerque and Rio Rancho, scheduled for last week and this week, were canceled. Meanwhile, my wife’s 93 year old parents, one with serious health issues, who my wife registered nearly three weeks ago, are still waiting for an appointment.
The Moar You Know
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Never been in Taiwan. Last time I was in Korea, the only way I could tell I wasn’t in Los Angeles when driving around is that they have really awesome pickup trucks in Korea. It’s most assuredly a first-world country, albeit one that treats their lower classes a bit better than ours.
Miss Bianca
@ColoradoGuy: You sure you don’t want to throw “China flu” in there as well, for good measure? To hit the Sinophobe trifecta, as it were? I am sure you must be aware that it’s not just China that’s sending rich tourists around the world, sitting on critical transmission information, *or* eating exotic viands. Our ski resort breakouts here in CO were fueled in large part by the European jet set, as I recall.
KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager))
My county, in the small state of MD, has 1.05 million people – almost as many as MT’s 1.07 million, and about twice as many as WY, ND, & SD. So it’s no wonder that SD and those other small, low-resident states are doing a better job at vaccinating their residents when compared to the 750 to 1000 doses per week that my county gets for our twice as many residents. They’re also red states, so they were allotted more doses under Trump’s crooked mis-administration.
I pre-registered my husband at the end of December, and at that time we thought he should be able to get an appointment sometime in February. It looks like that’s still the schedule, due to lack of vaccine. I’ve pre-registered (I’m younger, so I don’t fit the 75+ category), and hope for a March Fauci ouchie. My son qualifies for category 1C2 or 1C3, which should get him vaccinated by April or May (I have no idea when my daughter-in-law will get hers). The pre-registration and updates are easy, and I have no complaints about the information flow. I get an email about once a week. My husband gets the same emails too, and he seems a little confused by them, so I don’t know if that’s a problem for the system. He keeps thinking he has to do something every time he receives an email from them.
Anyway, that’s our experience, which is to say, not much experience at all, still just waiting. I don’t blame the state or the governor, I blame the crooked, incompetent, petty & vindictive Trump administration.
Matt McIrvin
@CindyH: I was thinking it might end up being like the flu vaccine, where every year they have to make an educated guess about which variants are going to be out there and give you a trivalent or tetravalent shot.
germy
@WaterGirl:
Yes. Biden has to put out the dumpster fire before he can give the dumpster a new coat of paint.
If Trump had somehow won reelection, we probably wouldn’t get vaccines until 2023, if at all.
Biden is taking this job seriously, as he promised he would. I’m optimistic for the first time in four years.
Lyrebird
@Cheryl Rofer: I’m sorry to hear that it’s not better everywhere! Thanks for sharing the experience, though. I can’t wait until I even have an appointment. Group 1B, but our state is all out of vaccine, not like that’s their fault. Glad it all went into people’s arms.
Matt McIrvin
What Cheryl described just sounds like the local CVS’s vaccination operation–surprisingly good if you need a flu shot or Shingrix, not so great if the state is trying to vaccinate everybody ASAP.
Cheryl Rofer
@dexwood: Seeing a story in today’s New Mexican that there isn’t enough vaccine. I don’t watch tv, so I missed that.
And your wife’s 93-year-old parents should definitely be getting their shots.
I figure that at a really granular, individual level there will be a bit of chaos as to who gets their dose when. The big push has to be to get as much vaccine into people as soon as possible.
I’m not blaming the Biden people. They walked into a mess bigger than they imagined. I look forward to the accounts of how it went, which will appear after they’ve got things on some sort of regular basis. Now, they’re just working to get things right.
And this thread is turning into a really informative resource as to how things are going on the ground. Thanks to the contributors!
Roger Moore
@Another Scott:
People are pinning a lot of hope on vaccination because it’s necessary to get back to something vaguely resembling pre-COVID life. Nobody wants to have to keep wearing masks and maintaining distancing indefinitely, so we really need to figure out how to make things work with just vaccination, testing, tracing, quarantine, and isolation. If we could do it just with vaccination and better treatments, that would be even better.
WaterGirl
@Soprano2: More charges are being filed, so the guy is not out of the woods yet. (read this on a previous BJ thread today)
oldgold
In Iowa the vaccine distribution process makes the last years Democratic caucus counting look like a paradigm of efficiency. It is a Laurel and Hardy operation without the laughs. Just, effing awful! People should be going to jail for a long time.
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
Employers and schools can mandate vaccination, but only for fully licensed vaccines. They can’t force you to get a medical treatment that’s still considered experimental, and these vaccines will still be considered experimental as long as they’re under an emergency use authorization rather than a final approval. IIRC, the final approvals will probably come some time in April or May, at which point a lot of employers are likely to demand their employees get vaccinated. Same with universities. Primary and secondary schools will take a lot longer, since there haven’t been clinical trials of the vaccines on children.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@germy: I got a card stamped with the kind of vaccine and even the batch number.
ColoradoGuy
@Miss Bianca: I grew up in Hong Kong, with the notorious wet markets. Cultural or not, they’re an obvious transmission path from the wild to a human population. The crucial difference with China vs Africa is a large, wealthy middle class that likes to travel. What made Ebola easier to contain was the absence of a jet-setting middle class, combined with a local government that wanted and accepted international help.
If Ebola had originated in a country with a wealthy middle class and a government with a track record of secrecy, much of the world would be dead now. We have to accept the world as it is. The CCP is here to stay, and China was the source of SARS-1 and SARS-2. Given that the cultural and political factors stay the same, another new disease is something we should expect.
It has nothing to do with politics or culture; it’s a function of exposure to wild animals and what happens when the initial human infection starts spreading human-to-human. Is it ignored? What does the rest of the world do? Is help accepted, or refused?
Soprano2
@WaterGirl: Crazy, that’s crazy. What are they prosecuting him for? I cannot imagine. “He gave people who weren’t supposed to get a vaccination one anyway, so get him!” I figure the acquittal will take about 2 minutes, tops.
gene108
NJ has a few “megasites” around the state, plus grocery stores, some pharmacies, local health departments, and community college locations.
My mom got her first shot yesterday at the local megasite, which is at our local shopping mall. She describes the experience more or less like you envisioned.
I’m a transplant recipient. I’m also eligible to get a shot around this time. Somehow getting to be able to schedule an appointment is next to fucking impossible for me.
I just have no idea what to do. I’ve done the usual calling, emailing, etc., but it goes nowhere. I did schedule with another location for July 5.
JoyceH
Yesterday I happened to see an article about a vaccine hotline in my county, so today I called it. Girl who answered the phone took my name and phone number, asked my age and health conditions, and told me to expect a call back in one to four weeks, and vaccines are administered at the high school. So sounds like we’ve got a system in place here. Fingers crossed…
JaneE
We get our health care through Kaiser in SoCal. Yesterday we got a call that my husband should make an appointment to get the vaccine. They were only offering it to all their members aged 85 and older. As they get more vaccine, they will open it up more, but the state 1b group now goes down to age 65. That is 1.5 million members in Southern California, for Kaiser alone. I hope they ramp up production soon.
BruceFromOhio
@Cheryl Rofer: I LOL’ed at this.
Very grateful there are arms getting the Fauci Ouchie.
Took a run through the buckeye health sites, and here it is:
I’m not in the designated age groups or classes of medical need, so it’s wait and see.
I’m reluctant to critique anything at this point; the Biden administration has been in power for six days, inherited a clusterfuck of epic proportion shot through with fascist morans in state leadership positions (*cough*DeSantis*cough*), and virulent strains of anti-vaxxer that seem only happy when everything in sight is set on fire.
It’s up to you all, but you might consider cutting the health care folks some slack. The dumpster fire deliberately sabotaged things from the jump, as always it’s the D’s cleaning up the mess left by the R’s, to the benefit of all.
Roger Moore
@ColoradoGuy:
No. What made Ebola easier to contain was that it has an R0 that’s barely above 1, so it’s possible to contain outbreaks exclusively with public health measures, and that it’s scary enough that people are generally willing to accept those public health measures when they know how important they are. If Ebola were transmitted as easily and rapidly as COVID, we’d all be fucked.
FWIW, the “jet setting middle class” seems to have relatively little to do with international transmission of COVID. For example, the outbreak in Italy seems to have come from Chinese workers in the Italian garment industry, not from middle class Chinese tourists.
VeniceRiley
I don’t know; but it would be irresponsible to not speculate that there is some tit for tat going on between the UK and AstraZeneca/Oxford and EU Pfizer/BioNTech.
It looks from afar that they’re both not very transparent and both suspect the other of playing supply games vis a vis what was already ordered. Much like what is discussed above on a local basis, but much bigger. Same forces- different scale.
Miss Bianca
@ColoradoGuy:
It has everything to do with politics and culture: everything significant does. I mean, out here where I live people are shooting, and eating, wild animals all the time: deer, elk, bear, birds, rabbits, pronghorns…as well as wild-caught fish. Hell, *I* am eating these things as well, and I am not a hunter. Are you going to say we have to initiate a ban on hunting here in the US? I am sure the PETA types would be creaming their jeans at the prospect of such a thing. I am not sure, however, that it would fly as a serious proposal, *or* that such a ban would end up being better for us.
I mean, it’s easy for me to say, “we should ban wet markets!” just because I hate the thought of pangolins and wild tigers and other exotic fauna being extinct-ified by human demand. But it’s *not* easy for me to make the leap to, “which means no one should hunt and/or eat any wild critter, ever!” Which is what that sort of thinking would inevitably lead to, if we’re being honest with ourselves.
Aleta
My sympathy, so far, has gone most of all to the state health departments and medical offices. Already overstressed and understaffed by the huge daily case numbers. (While coordinating contact tracing, inspecting rule-breaker restaurants, monitoring university testing. Interacting with schools and nursing homes, dealing with temperature control issues and non-vaccine supply shortages. More and more ‘paper’work that needs to be done right and phone calls. Balky computer systems and new programs to get used to.)
How to reliably schedule 1st and 2nd appointments (of same vaccine for both) when (in my state) the promised number of doses gets reduced with almost no notice and the dates/amounts of the next shipments are uncertain. (Here, a very large shipment also arrived with failed temperature control, so they have to decide if any can be used.)
It just blows my mind what they’re trying to do given the uncertainties and changes. And they care, and realize lives are at stake in almost every aspect of their work. And the ones doing the vaccinations are exposed to a stream of people every day, a possible variant that’s more transmissible, then going home to families who may not have been vaccinated yet.
And they’re not just already exhausted yet doing all this extra work, but as someone commented, each state health dept. is deciding on its own program, monitoring how well it’s working and reporting on it all. A year ago we were assuming it might be a much longer time before vaccines were available at all.
People around me of all ages are suffering from stress and illness, but so far I have no blame for the state health departments or shaky delivery systems.
rikyrah
So happy for you.
I thought that I had the chance to get an appointment. Tried for hours yesterday. Didn’t work.
Pretty bummed.
Geminid
@The Moar You Know: I find wet markets creepy in a way I do not the big chicken houses I’ll see around Harrisonberg Va. or the hog farms i smell crossing easten North Carolina. And the latter two kinds of animal culture do not create pathways for transmission of bat viruses to humans. At least I hope not. But I keep in mind that large chicken and pork populations carry their own particular virus populations that may jump to humans.
Feathers
@The Moar You Know: Talking with a Chinese friend, who opposed them, the cultural issue is one of the expectation of outrageous and ostentatious displays of hospitality and gift giving. You need to be shown to be giving or serving the rarest and most precious delicacies. In a healthy way, it’s multi-thousands of dollars for a perfect strawberry or melon. At its worst, wet markets with “wild” animals. I put wild in quotes because almost all are now bred and raised for slaughter under horrific conditions.
Why is getting rid of them going to be hard? Because the market for “wet market meat” is the Chinese equivalent of Wall Street/Silicon Valley bros and Trumpy assholes who like pissing off normies. Apparently the Chinese version of these people is worse than the Western one, at least according to one Chinese person.
rikyrah
Yes, 46’s Team had to start from scratch.
FROM SCRATCH.
Don’t even have the numbers for how many doses have been done.
I know, intellectually and in my heart, that those muthaphuckas didn’t have an actual plan.
They only planned to use to vaccine to punish the Blue States.
They planned to take herd immunity to it’s ultimate conclusion of 2 million dead.
So, while I am angry and frustrated and was pretty devastated when I couldn’t get an appointment yesterday,
I know that those who actually want us to live are in charge right now.
Roger Moore
@Miss Bianca:
And it’s important to point out that there are instances of new zoonotic viruses starting here in the United States, like hantavirus. There are some things the US does to limit the spread of those viruses. Notably, while it’s fine to eat hunted meat and to share it with family and friends, there are strict limits on selling hunted meat and wild-caught freshwater fish.
Anotherlurker
@Feathers: Are the dogmeat markets also part of this status symbol consumption?
lee
I’m in a suburb of Dallas, Texas. My 88 year old Dad is in one county and I’m next door in another.
He lives in a Senior Living apartment complex. Every year they have a flu shot clinic that gets everyone vaccinated (had one last year in Oct).
There is no overall plan for Texas. From what I can gather each county has to set up their own process and they don’t have any idea when/how much they are getting. So every county sets up a wait list and they slowly work their way down the list. I told him to use my address and sign up for the wait list for my county as well (it’s a bit more affluent than his). Hopefully on 2 lists he can get his Fauci Ouchie soon.
Some of the hospitals in Texas and just now getting all of their employees vaccinated.
Miki
@Ruckus: “[E]ven though the VA website has a Covid section, it is woefully out of step/information.”
No shit …. It’s been pretty much radio silence for weeks, then all of a sudden last week I got a message from my VA telling me to call and schedule both appointments. Shot #1 is scheduled for Feb 6, Shot #2 for Feb 27. My clinic is only doing them on weekends, which is frankly fine with me.
I’m looking forward to the events but a bit anxious about it actually happening because I have no sense of whether amounts allocated to the VA are sufficient to cover 65+. I’m fairly certain the distribution numbers we’re hearing about don’t include VA distributions, at least not in Minnesota.
Apparently we don’t have a need to know, thus the radio silence. Sigh ….
Barbara
@Roger Moore: But a driver of the outbreak in the U.S. definitely did involve tourists from Italy and likely other countries. Idaho and Colorado both had early, large outbreaks tied to ski tourism. Even within European countries, ski resorts were a significant vector — not just skiers, of course, but people who worked in resorts. I believe that the New York catastrophe was largely fueled by travel to and from Europe. Migration of all kinds, including tourism, will have an impact.
ETA: I miss skiing. I have resigned myself not to go at all this year, anywhere, unless by some miracle I get vaccinated before the season ends. Even if I do the necessary self-isolation followed by a negative test, I know many people who are treating both of these as something of a joke, and I would be in contact with those people. Not worth it.
Miss Bianca
@Roger Moore: True. All the wild meat and fish I get, I get from friends who have hunted or fished it, not via the butcher’s downtown. And the venison/elk/bison meat available commercially is from farmed animals.
And let’s not forget we have bubonic plague as well as hantavirus out here from our local wild varmints. Yee-haw!
@Barbara: You are correct, madam!
Kineslaw
My county of 2.1 million people is trying to avoid having to cancel appointments by just giving two days notice of your appointment. You sign up online, or call a phone number, get a confirmation email and then wait. Eventually you get a text message, phone call AND email, offering you a two-hour appointment window in two days. I don’t think there is much flexibility, but there is some. I got a notification at 5pm on Monday I could get vaccinated between 1-3 on Wednesday.
The county is using hubs, and they are well-organized and able to process a lot of people quickly. The one I went to had at least 40 people working it and could handle at least 100 people per hour. I had to stand in a long line, but was in and out in 45 minutes.
The eligible group is 65+ OR 18+ with pre-existing condition, which doesn’t prioritize the elderly as much, but does allow a lot of essential employees and people from more at-risk communities quicker access to the vaccine. Tarrant County had just been going in order of sign-up, but I think they are trying to prioritize hard hit zip codes now. I think you can also get some idea of where you are in line now. Before you had no idea.
Shockingly, vaccine sign-up based on the internet has left some people behind, but at least it doesn’t require constantly checking and refreshing to try and get an appointment. Given the availability issues for the vaccine, a system trying to schedule more than one-two weeks out seems destined to failure. We have not had issues of people being in line and the county running out of vaccine since the current system was implemented.
Matt McIrvin
@ColoradoGuy: My impression was that in this case, the focus on the Wuhan wet market was a bit of a red herring–that is, the virus did spread there, but human to human as it could have in any public place. That’s not to say they wouldn’t provide cross-species opportunities in other cases.
Scout211
@Scout211:
The state of California just now announced a new plan for distribution of the vaccine, coordinated by the state (not individual counties) starting next month. Hopefully, this will help clear up the crazy, frustrating and uneven process.
https://www.kcra.com/article/dr-mark-ghaly-covid-19-briefing-jan-26/35323702
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
I know and understand, but.
This is a pandemic, with +400K dead already and a political party, at least the leadership, that doesn’t think killing a large portion of the population is wrong. And it probably wouldn’t matter if it was mandated tomorrow, because I’d bet at least a third of the country is going to resist on some kind of principle, one that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever but that’s never stopped them yet.
I’m just a bit tired, and worried, and pissed, as most/all of us are. I’m over 70, have comorbidities, and still work, at least I am/was planning to for 3-4 more months.
scav
A medical conference is Boston was another early super-spreader event in the US, so life is indeed, alas, complicated.
WhatsMyNym
@Faithful Lurker: I’m also in P.T. Signed my mother up on the easy to use online system (I’m too young). The staff were well organized and we were out of there in 20 minutes and never left the car.
Both counties on the N Olympic Peninsula are having to wait a week until they have more vaccine.
waratah
My daughter called me last Tuesday to be ready to go and get a vaccine at our civic center. We had tried to set up an appointment with my pharmacy but they were already booked solid for two weeks and not taking any more appoints right now. I was reluctant to go because of long lines and cold weather. I was really grateful because it was really organized. We arrived when it opened at 11am and there was a long line. I was put in the expedited line because of health problems. I went straight through and filled out paperwork and received my shot from an EMT with the fire department. The regular line came to an area with 280 chairs. They filled out the paperwork and where then called into the expedited are where thirty people were giving the shots. There were chairs for them to sit and wait to see if they have a reaction. My area had three people at that time to give shots. We were out in less than an hour and there was not any lines outside the door. This was in Amarillo. I think that trying to work with mayors cities and in this area for small country areas the county’s. I complain so much about Republicans I feel like I need to give them credit when they do some things well.
Ohio Mom
I can only assume that Biden’s to-do list includes re-creating the lab we used to have in China (before Trump closed it) where our scientists were keeping an eye out for new viruses.
Ohio Family is having mixed results in our efforts to be vaccinated: Ohio Grandmother was vaccinated in her retirement home — they came to her, that was extremely simple.
Ohio Son will be vaccinated on Thursday, via the County Development Disabilities Board. They called us to set up the appointment, sent us detailed instructions about where to park, what door to use, what to expect, etc. This level of hand-holding is very typical of DDS.
I signed up with the County Board of Health but apparently I can’t make an appointment until February 8th. Their site is a little hard to navigate.
Ohio Dad, who is the highest risk of any of us, is too young at 63 to sign up, let alone make an appointment.
TL/dr: we are making progress, though not as much as we would like.
Aleta
@rikyrah: Hope it comes very soon for you. Sorry — the disappointment must be extra hard after waiting so long and finally expecting it .
My cousin, a health care worker for people with severe disabilities, expected to be given an appointment two weeks ago but is still waiting for the call. First fewer doses arrived than promised, then a truckload (1,400 doses I think) arrived possibly damaged, and fewer doses have come north than the southern part of the state.
Aleta
I miss swimming.
Ken
OK, it’s been 75 minutes, so we’re good to go with criticism of the failed Biden administration?
(Assuming I’m right that the comment timestamps are US Eastern zone. EDIT: Looks like I am.)
trollhattan
@Ken:
Kind of yells for a new rotating tag in the spirit of “how has Obama failed you today?”
ETA for a sleepy old guy Biden certainly hit the ground running. Must have got a new battery for the Scamp.
Jacqueline Squid Onassis
At the current rate of vaccination (about 1/4 million in a month), I can expect Oregon to get around to vaccinating me by June of 2022. Hurrah!
namekarB
Same here in Placer County. When the governor dropped the age restriction from 75 to 65 it resulted in 80,000 more Placer County residents scrambling for an already overloaded system. I’m 73 and managed to snag an appointment at Safeway but my 93 year old mother can’t get an appointment because Kaiser doesn’t have enough vaccine and she lives in a “Senior Living” facility that doesn’t fit the same category as Nursing Homes or Assisted Living so nobody is going to go to her facility to administer vaccines. So every day my sister and I are on the computer morning and night trying to find an appointment for Mom. And no, I cannot give up my own appointment and give it to Mom. If I cancel my appointment, the pharmacy decides who to give it to.
Yeah, things in CA are FUBAPB
trollhattan
@Jacqueline Squid Onassis:
I’m tempted to slap a ruler on the graph and assume it draws the future, but there’s plenty of room for accelerating the pace of inoculations if they can patch the supply glitches. Here’s hoping.
IIUC the Johnson & Johnson vaccine might be close to approval, too.
sab
@Soprano2: Ohio the governor has said ” don’t throw vaccine out, stick it in somebody’s arm even if their group isn’t up yet.
bluefoot
@jonas: Everything I’ve heard about NY is a clusterfuck. My sister in NYS is a schoolteacher whose superintendent is committed to in-person school “no matter what.” She signed up for the vaccine and had an appointment which was cancelled since the state received less vaccine than was promised. She has to sign up again once appointments become available again. It’s ridiculous.
She’s been trying to work through the teachers’ union to get vaccination on site to all faculty and staff (including janitors, cafeteria people, etc) but hasn’t been able to get any kind of reliable info.
Scout211
@namekarB:
See my update at #125 @Scout211: There (hopefully) should be improvements coming starting mid-Februrary when the state of California takes over the vaccination program.
Lyrebird
@WaterGirl: What you said.
I came back to give some applause, so please pretend I know how to put little clapping emojis in here, to @Cheryl Rofer:
When she says, we need to do better, she gives background, details, and some reasonable comparison points.
Wish everyone did that.
I’m looking at Twitter today and seeing all of this, well yah he stopped private prisons, that’s “good… but… not even remotely huge: , someone else has “President Fine Print” as a handle and is tearing this down as mere show. DAY 6 y’all!
Feathers
@Anotherlurker: Wet market is a broad term. What has been particularly worrisome is the phenomenon of wet markets which offer many animals, especially exotics, who live in open cages stacked atop each other, with multi-species waste and food intermingling. This is the danger for creating diseases that cross the species barrier.
Single species wet markets are an animal rights issue, not a disease vector per se.
Elie
@aliasofwestgate:
I think you are right and those doses were probably ripped off by the Trumpistas… which is why they probably didnt cooperate with the transition ramping up.
My hubbie and I got our first Pfizer shot last Saturday up here in WA state in Bellingham and it was first rate organized, but we fell into the opportunity by word of mouth to call rather than being invited.
I am working hard to get my sis who is in Chicago vaccinated. She is high risk and 68 years old but so far no luck.
We are still in catch as catch can nationally but I have faith it will get better. Again, I won’t be surprised to learn that Jared Kushner or his gang made off with the doses the states are missing…
cain
@The Moar You Know:
If wet markets is something that is creating these viruses then it should be seriously looked at.
Roger Moore
@Barbara:
Sure. But the spread from China was heavily driven by migrant labor, not by the jet set. That means zoonitic diseases could easily spread from any country that’s a source of migrant labor, not just ones that have middle classes rich enough for tourism. Once the disease spreads from its initial location via migrant labor, it can spread further from the secondary point of outbreak.
Ken
Getting secret orders over his Peloton bike from his controllers in China.
Oh wait, it’s Tuesday, so the controllers are in the Ukraine. It was nice of them to agree to a sharing arrangement.
Anotherlurker
@Feathers: Thanks for pointing out the differences.
I am curious if eating dogs is a status issue?
I am now the proud papa of a Golden Retriever who was rescued from a Chinese slaughterhouse truck. I was shocked when I out the practice of eating dogs was really a thing.
cain
Spanish Flu came from Kansas – slaughterhouses?
However, knowing some of the Asian mindset – China definitely feels it has lost face though in regards to this virus escaping. I seem to recall that they had banned some of the open air market practices, but then let them lax.
Ben Cisco
I was surprised when the VA called me and told me to show up last Saturday for jab 1. Apparently, respiratory issues (of which I had a metric shit-ton last year) + existing heart stuff = comorbidities! Yay! Mama Cisco got her first one yesterday; my lady friend (medical field) got her second. One step closer…
Ken
@Feathers: @cain: I could swear that back around May of last year, I read that China had cracked down on the wet markets. Did they allow them to start up again?
Feathers
@bluefoot: One of the things Biden could announce is that there will be teams going around from school to school vaccinating the teachers and staff as soon as there is enough vaccine available.
I have a teacher friend who says she just wants to strangle some coworkers who are just spiraling in an anxiety cycle over COVID terror. The danger is real, but there is also a deeply unhealthy panic going on as well. Putting together some sort of plan would really help with that.
O. Felix Culpa
Cheryl, your experience is disappointing to hear. I expected our governor and the DOH to do a better job of organizing the vaccine rollout. I’m in tier 1c, so presumably have a while to wait for my Fauci ouchie.
ETA: I registered on the NM website as soon as I became aware of it. I wonder if I should check more regularly too for updates.
Ruckus
@Miki:
I don’t think it’s a not need to know basis, I think it’s a shitty planning, don’t have a clue basis. Name anyone in the now thankfully gone maladministration who could actually get anything done. They are all grifters and money grubbing assholes. The appearance of them doing something is all they care about, the my pillow dipshit is a prime example. Crappy products, sold at a high profit margin with massive advertising to get gullible people to buy. Old adage, if it’s too good to be true, it most likely isn’t true. And they are trying to sell political theater, not responsible government, and it’s worked with gullible assholes. The repercussions of this will be with us for a long time and be very costly to all of us.
Taken4Granite
@Miss Bianca: Also keep in mind that not all of China’s wet markets sell exotic animals (although some do). Most Chinese buy chicken, pork, seafood, and beef at wet markets. They have a cultural preference (refrigeration being a luxury to which many have gained access only during their lifetimes) for fresh meat; the chicken you eat for lunch in China was probably killed that morning. The reason they are called wet markets is because of the animal blood on the floor.
Other countries have things that are similar to wet markets (such as farmers’ markets in the US) but have found ways to implement them that do not involve large amounts of blood on the floor. China should be encouraged to do likewise, although it will take a long time for that to happen because a country as big as China will have a lot of social inertia.
Many flu strains originate in southern China because it is a place where large numbers of people live in close proximity to livestock. Rural non-mountainous areas of southern China will have a higher population density than many suburban areas of the US. In the case of COVID-19, the last I heard (admittedly many months ago) is that similar viruses exist in bats throughout southern and central China, and often bats are in close (though not as close as livestock) proximity to humans.
cain
@ColoradoGuy:
I really hate the fact that ivory poaching in Africa is driven by old Chinese folks wanting it as a sign of luck. So thankful that we can now recreate ivory in a lab.
rikyrah
@Aleta:
I do too.
And, going to the movies.
Of everything, I miss those the most.
The peace of mind that came to me everytime I hit the water..
I totally miss that. :(
O. Felix Culpa
@ColoradoGuy: I lived for a decade in Hong Kong, and its wet markets basically sold vegetables, poultry, and already slaughtered beef (usually halal) and pork. Nothing notorious about them at all, except smelly in the summer.
ETA: What Taken4Granite said at #154. While some wet markets in China might sell “exotic” meats, for the vast majority of markets just substitute “fresh” for “wet.” The Chinese have a strong preference for fresh foods, also propelled by lack of or small refrigerators. A lot of the wet market discussion here has a substantial whiff of racism and/or ignorance.
mrmoshpotato
@trollhattan: How have <insert all living and dead Democratic presidents> failed you today?
Well, don’t get me started about FDR!
Miss Bianca
@Anotherlurker: I’m shocked to realize that people are breeding Golden Retrievers for *eating*. To the extent that I ever thought about it, I guess I figured that it was little poi-dog type mongrels that would be considered eating material.
Aleta
(NYT) Map of states showing Share of population that has gotten at least one shot. The states currently with the highest level (over 7%) are
VT, DC, CT, WV; OK, ND, SD; NM and Alaska.
cain
Our vaccination speed is really turtle slow. I’m trying to figure out why it’s so bad?
Keith P.
If I never hear the phrase “We’ve got to do better”, it will be too soon. Zuckerberg killed that phrase dead.
Feathers
@Ken: The problem is that the customers of the exotic wet markets we are talking about are overwhelmingly extremely rich and powerful assholes. With the current travel restrictions, we don’t really know what is going on with this. They closed them after SARS, but everything reopened because of who the customers are.
The topic started when someone started talking about China and wet markets. Is complaining about wet markets racist? It’s something people should be very specific about, because, as in much of Asia, the pre-refrigeration tradition of slaughtering animals for meat at the point of sale, has continued long after it ended in Europe and the US. There are ways that wet markets can become disease vectors, so it’s important to focus specifically on that.
Feathers
@cain: Trump.
Roger Moore
@O. Felix Culpa:
The wet markets I visited in Singapore were similar. They were called wet markets because they were emptied out and hosed down when the market closed.
Cheryl Rofer
@O. Felix Culpa: Definitely check back to see if there’s more you need to add at the NM website. They added a couple of pages of questions after I signed up, and you need to have them all filled out in order to be contacted.
But I think we’re not to Group 1C yet. A lot more to go in 1B, and they are running out of vaccine.
jonas
@germy: My guess is that some kind of seasonal flu/Covid double shot each fall for the whole population becomes the new normal going forward.
kindness
I got my second Modera vaccine shot this morning. I work for Kaiser and employees started getting them last month. Now they are giving them to members too. I’ve told my daughter to book her appointment as she still is out and about more than I feel comfortable.
feebog
Not reading all the comments because I am trying to actually accomplish some work today and this is a brief break. But I want to share my experience here in SoCal. We have multiple mega sites set up in LA County. We have a well publicized website, VaccinanteLACounty.com where you can sign up for on of the mega sites or any number of smaller venues. It took me several attempts before I found a mega site currently taking appointments. The wife and I signed up simultaneously on two different devices. This was on Sunday and our appointment was for 3:00 p.m. yesterday at Magic Mountain, an amusement park in Santa Clarita about 25 minutes away. The site was well organized and we went through registration in about 20 minutes. But when we got to the actual injection area we had to wait a while. This site is administering the Pfizer vaccine and it is really fragile. The nurse injecting the shots in our lane (there were multiple lanes) had to wait for thawed does to be brought to her a few at a time. My wife got hers first and then we waited almost five minutes for additional doses to be delivered to our lane. We asked about how many people they were processing each day and they said about 2,000. This site, as well as others, are set up to accommodate twice that. So the refrigeration problems with the Pfizer vaccine are real and definitely impacting high volume sites. That said, once the J & J vaccine is approved and distribution starts, we are going to see a rapid acceleration as that version does not need refrigeration and is one and done. I have great confidence that the Biden team is going to rapidly expand vaccination availability and to get this thing done.
Roger Moore
@Feathers:
An important thing to remember is that they now believe the Wuhan wet market was just an early spreading point, not the place where the initial transmission from animal to human took place. It’s not at all clear that initial transmission had anything to do with the exotic animal trade, so talking about it as if wet markets are the big culprit is at least out of date thinking.
O. Felix Culpa
@cain:
Because Trump. Not a lot of figuring required.
cain
@Feathers:
That figures.. he probably specifically targeted our state for lack of vaccines.
O. Felix Culpa
@Cheryl Rofer: Yeah, I did go back at one point to discover they wanted more info, which I filled out. But I’ll keep checking.
FYI, the Santa Fe County Democratic Party is having a webinar tomorrow night on Covid in NM. Teresa Leger Fernandez, a local state rep, county commissioner, and a representative from DOH will take part. You can register here if you’re interested.
mrmoshpotato
@Ken: What day is the mole people‘s day?
Cameron
Totally OT: y’all snickered about ‘covfefe.’ Well, guess what? Suck on this, libtards! Pwned!
https://www.saveur.com/story/recipes/kiveve-paraguayan-squash-puree/
Ken
In fact, they’ve unearthed a video of the meeting where Trump was told about the virus.
raven
I have a friend who is finish her PhD in neuroscience and is working at the local hospital. She got both shot and she and her husband and two littles came down with.
Ken
@mrmoshpotato: As a chthonic race, the mole people are obviously on Saturday, because of its association with agricultural deities.
Roger Moore
@feebog:
It’s a minor point, but we don’t actually know the Pfizer vaccine is really that fragile. It’s entirely possible that it’s stable long-term in the refrigerator. We just don’t know because the technology is so new they haven’t had a chance to thoroughly test its stability under less rigorous storage conditions. Until that testing has been done, they have to treat it as if it needs the really rigorous storage conditions that have been proven to work.
jonas
@bluefoot: Yeah, the aggravating thing is less the lack of vaccine than the lack of information. Nobody knows anything. The local distribution sites have no idea where things stand with the county; the county claims it knows nothing because the state isn’t telling it anything; the state claims its hands are tied because the feds won’t give them timely info on the availability of doses; the feds claim…. Well, I have no idea. New people have to move into their new jobs and get up to speed and figure out what was and wasn’t done during the previous administration. So of course they don’t know anything yet. Meanwhile Pfizer and Moderna are supposedly cranking out millions of doses. But nobody knows where they are.
mrmoshpotato
@Ken: Excellent. Glad to know they’re in the rotation.
WaterGirl
@Ken: Ha! I was speaking more figuratively than literally. :-)
catclub
Not even extra -snarky? I am disappoint.
WaterGirl
@raven:
Are you saying she had gotten both shots and she got COVID anyway, as well as her whole family? Had she gotten to the end o the 2-week period after the second shot?
Winston
I have nothing but good things to say about my vax appt this morning. I was scheduled to be at the ymca at 8:35 (be there on time! she said). So I was. At the front door I was temp checked, given a clipboard and pen, shown to a chair in the gym, where I could fill out the form, guided to a desk where a very nice young lady sat. She looked at my ids, insurance cards, and printed me out a sticker id which I placed on my t shirt. She then said go over their and get your vac. The nurse administering the jab was ready to go. I kidded her a bit. My flu jab I rated a 10, I said, I didn’t even feel it. Bamm. You get a 9. She laughed, as I hardly felt it. Go sit down and wait 15 minutes, so I did and left at 9 am with a sticker that said I’m vaccinated and paperwork for my next appointment Feb 23. Now 7 hours later, my shoulders and legs are stiff, I’m a bit fatigued but not sore and my vitals are good. 97.8t 98%ox 66hb. Glad to be alive.
eta typos
Ken
@Roger Moore: How would they even test variation in the storage conditions? Short of another phase III trial using vaccines that had been stored under the less-rigorous conditions, which sounds like a PR nightmare (quite aside from any ethical concerns). Maybe there’s some chemical assay they can do, to determine that the lipids or the RNA have degenerated?
sab
@raven: Two shots plus two weeks? That’s what it takes for immunity. Anything less and she still likely came down with milder case than she would have had with no shot.
Miss Bianca
@cain: “Spanish flu” (so called, I found out, because the Spanish press was the only one being open about the pandemic, and admitting that it had come to their shores) does appear to have originated in Kansas. Not sure about the slaughterhouses – I heard it was first found in army barracks, among WWI recruits waiting to ship out.
zzyzx
@sab: For that matter, 95% still gives a 1/20 shot of getting unlucky.
raven
@WaterGirl: No, she came down with it a couple of days after the second shot.
Leumas
Completely agree. I live in Tulsa County, population about 700,000. Got
my first Pfizer vaccine last Wednesday. 1.5 hours from getting out of my car to
getting back into my car. There are several sites listed on the website as administering
vaccine, but only the County Health Department has appointment available. The line
moderator said their were 1,800 appointments that day. Sounds good, but that would tak 388 days to vaccinate Tulsa County. They are not giving vaccine on weekends. We must do better.
sab
@Miss Bianca: Eating-dogs are bred either to be not bright (chows, which in their early days in Europe were called Chinese edible dogs) or very sweet and not finicky. Unfortunately Goldens fit that bill. Always sweet, and can and will eat anything.
My sister recalls meeting a guy in western China in the late 1980s who had a wonderful young dog he had trained to do tricks. It was scheduled to be on the menu for Chinese New Year.
My cousins in Ohio raised lambs every year, played with them all summer, then ate them that winter.
Scout211
I must say, this thread is magic. Seriously!
Upthread I complained about the California counties having to manage their COVID vaccination distribution all on their own and how that was a frustrating and confusing process and basically a mess.
Then at noon today, the state announced that they are taking over the vaccine program to streamline and improve the process by mid-February. Boom!
Then just now my doctor’s office called and scheduled appointments for the COVID vaccine for the both of us on February 8th and March 8th!
Like magic!
I am over the moon. Yay!
sab
@zzyzx: Agreed.
satby
@soup time: My experience was far more like yours. Efficient, multiple stations for administering the shot, reasonably fast turn over including a 15 minute stay in case of an allergic reaction. Second appointment for the booster dose set before you left. I was kind of impressed, actually. It was the local health department and up to then I haven’t been a fan of their efforts during the pandemic.
Ken
@Miss Bianca: You remind me that Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, among others, claimed that epidemics such as the Spanish Flu are caused by life forms entering the atmosphere from space (a form of “panspermia“).
I wonder how many people are still pushing that idea, now that we can sequence the viruses and trace them to existing animal viruses?
J R in WV
I’ve been pretty upset by the lack of actual information about where to go / what to do / how to get in line for a Covid-19 vaccination. I have seen on MSM that WV is believed to be handling the vaccination program better than most states — if that is actually true, people should be having car burning parties outside health dept offices, because it is as bad here as anywhere else.
Wife and I are both over 70, she was awarded total permanent disability back in the early 2000s, had septic shock in 2011 from necrotic pneumonia (Did you even know that’s a thing? Very rare! Indetectable via testing, her surgeon finally took a look at her collapsed lung to see why it wasn’t reinflating, found rot, OMG, what he expected to be a 30 minute procedure took 4 hours!!!) Anyway, in my mind AND our family practice Dr’s mind, that’s bad news and she should be at the front of the line.
Anyway, we are both entered into a commercial web product called Everbridge, which has a ton of WV DHHR labeling on it, as if someone there wrote it– not, hahaha. We’ll get an email someday. Seriously, the web app seems pretty professional, now one big question is can it handle appointments for over a million hillbillies?
Hopefully, with luck, since we share an address and a last name someone may have written a routine to pop an appointment for a second person in a family. In any case, I’ll drive Wife, she’s due for cataract surgery next month, can’t really see right now.
As others have said, President Biden hasn’t been in office even a week yet, so I’m prepared to cut him slack for, like the rest of the year. Especially as we see improvement right away!
I think Jared K should be indicted for genocide against a whole class of people for deciding he didn’t need to do anything about Sars-2-Coronavirus-19 because it was going to hit more Democrats than it would Republicans. If we don’t have a genocide statute (and WHY NOT!?!??), then the alternative is 420,000 murder indictments. I don’t think it would make him squirm because he doesn’t have a soul. He wouldn’t care until the cell door slammed shut…
TEL
@Anotherlurker: My mom is in the same place as you – over 65 in Contra Costa (assuming you’re in the bay area). The county health website currently has changed who can get an appointment to those 75 and older because they don’t have enough doses for the 65-75.
citizen dave
@jonas: This a well done post about the central problem of little to no information (yet some vaccines are getting accomplished). I did a similar post a few weeks ago after I spoke with a nurse in our newly-created city Health Dept. She said the plan changes weekly. I could tell it was going to be a while at that point; like others, I have complete confidence the Biden team will perform at the highest level on this.
J R in WV
@Aleta:
Well, I buy that data, but it sure doesn’t feel that good here in our rural county. Looks like WV is 4th or 5th in the nation for using all the doses shipped into the state.
StringOnAStick
We’re new in this state and don’t have a GP yet, so we’ll risk that first and then hope that helps us get in line. We’re under 65 but husband has a condition so I don’t let him go to the store.
Miss Bianca
@sab: Yeah, little lambs (there are three bummer lambs right now at the barn where I board my horse) are adorable. Still find I can face the prospect of eating them in a year or two without too many qualms. Dogs, I dunno. It’s all a cultural thing and what you’re used to, I guess.
I do remember reading a children’s book in my impressionable youth about a couple of Chinese boys engaged in essentially a 4-H project, to raise pigs to be eaten at the New Year. One boy decides he can’t face eating his pet; but being something of a trickster figure, cons the other boy (and all the other kids in the village) that his pig is going to be a MONSTER, and will win the prize for biggest pig. So this other boy toils away all year long and raises *his* pig to be the monster that win the prize, and figures he’s got the best of the other boy, who simply smiles at him and says, “while you are EATING your pig, I will be WALKING with mine.”
Made a big impression on me – until that point I had no idea that people might think of pigs as pets, rather than eating.
Then I started reading the Freddy the Pig series. That was as close as I’ve ever come to feeling like I might renounce bacon. (Narrator Voice: “*That* didn’t last long…”)
Miss Bianca
@Ken: Whoa…”panspermia”? Do you pronounce that the way I think you do…?
(Yeah, my inner Beavis and Butthead are sniggering. So sue me.)
Ruckus
@cain:
It’s slow everywhere and that is by
designdisaster by the trump maladministration.They lied about the quantity of vaccine. They had zero plan to distribute, administer. The only thing they had any idea about was how to kill or harm the most people.
Biden has on his 6th day and this is a massive logistical and medical problem. It will take time, it will take reasonable people on the ground in individual states doing the work and because of that the results will vary, from great to crap. States can not run a deficit, so the money for vaccines has to come from the federal government. Leadership has to come from the federal government. That takes some time to get back, more than 6 days. The current republican politicians have just been beaten and are pissed about that, which will make things a bit worse in some cases. Time and effort is the only thing that will actually work.
The magnitude and particularities of vaccine distribution on this scale and timeframe is massive. The number of vaccines available is 2, for how many billions of people? Sure there are a couple more, the UK and Russian ones, but that covers what 200-500 million? The Chinese vaccine will cover their billion+ but when is that going to be widely available? So we wait what seems like forever, and meanwhile they create more doses, J&J may come through, adding a source.
Yes time is not on our side here but time is the real cost in this issue, what with having shitforbrains only out of the way for less than a week.
citizen dave
Found my state’s (Indiana) vaccine dashboard–we’re right about average population for a state if you divide 325 million by 50, gives 6.5 million people. In the last 24 hours they are reporting 19K first time shots, and 6800 2nd shots. Overall we have 107K fully done and 460 K first shots. Getting there. Actually 20K per day would be right on our share of 1 million per day nationally.
Hoosiers are making the Moderna vaccine in Bloomington–can’t we divert whatever we need? :)
sab
@Miss Bianca: I have never eaten a dog in my life. (My sister did by mistake in China. She threw up afterwards.) I don’t eat pork either because I have known some great potbellied pigs.
I do eat beef, mutton, poultry and fish. Tried vegetarianism for decades but I kept getting vitamin deficiencies. That’s just me. More organized people and cultures manage it fine.
Quiltingfool
@Miss Bianca: Ft. Riley Kansas had the first case documented of the 1918 Influenza. I taught a mini unit to my 8th grade science students re 1918 pandemic. Reports said there were wind storms that stirred up dust from huge piles of manure and afterwards the first flu cases showed up. Not sure that was the cause, could have been coincidental. PBS has some great teaching materials, and the video was very good. I don’t know how much my kids learned, but I learned a lot!
Keith P.
@Cheryl Rofer: AFAIK we are in Phase 1c. I’m a dialysis patient and got the info for scheduling an appointment a week and a half ago. I’m in Texas (Harris County), where there are 3 hubs – none of which are currently accepting appointment requests. I sent them an email asking what happens if they start accepting appointments again right when Phase 2 starts (jacking up demand), but don’t expect a reply. At this point, I am starting to suspect my “vaccine” will be the natural immunity I will get *if* I survive the inevitable COVID bout.
(I’m not listening to anyone saying “be patient; we’re getting there” any more)
Ken
Yup, “Throat Warbler Mangrove”, just like it’s spelled.
BTW I don’t rule out panspermia completely, any more than I rule out the existence of alien life. It’s a big universe, it may happen somewhere. But it’s not the cause of epidemics here on Earth.
Ruckus
@sab:
Didn’t/don’t kids on farms/ranches raise calves and when they grow up they become dairy and meat cows? 4F, schools, etc.
sab
@Quiltingfool: I am so old…My next door neighbor who was old when I was in high school lost both her parents to 1918 flu when she was twelve. She had to leave Sonoma County and live with aunts and uncles she didn’t know in Boston.
sab
@Ruckus: Yep. Meet my cousins.
I actually don’t have a problem with ignoring “don’t name your food” if you can do it. My cousins’ lambs all had happy lambhoods. My cousins don’t seem to be sociopaths.
ETA Their favorite pony died and my aunt had its hide tanned and turned into a skirt! Browm and white spotted!
Miss Bianca
@Ruckus: 4-H and the related animal auction at the County Fair are *big* deals around here, still. And the County Fair was the only organization that had those events planned for this summer whose plan was sensible and worked flawlessly, btw.
Starboard Tack
@Miss Bianca:
A long time ago when the Babe movies were current I was having lunch with a friend’s young children. The 4 year old asked me if I knew that “pigs is ham.” I said yes. He looked up from his ham sandwich and asked “Do you think this is Babe”? I assured him that Babe was lounging by a pool in Beverly Hills.
chopper
@Feathers:
unless the species is bats, i would figure. man do we have to watch out for fucking bats.
Roger Moore
@sab:
A friend who raised livestock as a youngster said they named their pigs things like Porkchop, Bacon, and Ham so they’d never forget what was going to happen to them in the end.
Carol
Things are a mess in Colorado, at least they have been for me. I do have an appointment Friday for my first moderna shot, but only because my neighbor is a retired MD with connections and told me about the opportunity. I have to go into another county to get it, though.
I called some friends an acquaintances to let them know and was surprised that a couple of them were not interested. One said she would wait for the J&J vaccine and another said she would wait until their family (adult children and grandchildren) could get shot at the same time. Whatever.
Suzanne
I am in Allegheny County, PA. Signup here has been a mess. Most people who are not getting vaccinated through their work have to sign up on Rite Aid’s website. It takes over an hour to get into the website, depending on the time of day. I have an appointment for SuzMom on a Thursday. We have to drive to an adjoining county.
Miss Bianca
@Carol: Man, I didn’t know you could sign up in another county. I mean, I knew you could if you’re a patient at a medical center in another county, but not otherwise.
Ella in New Mexico
i was incredibly pleased with the vaccination process as a front line healthcare provider at UNMH. Super easy to schedule and appointment, well organized and orderly line that got you in and out in like 25 minutes.
I’ve not been that pleased with the way it’s rolled out for the average person. Our organization filed a complaint that the original, online only sign up was discriminatory because so many people in NM don’t have access to or are savvy enough to use the internet, much less an email address or a smartphone.
We’re all pleased that the DOH responded with a telephone based hotline last week. It’s a start.
I’m still having mixed feelings about people going to commercial pharmacies as the rate of vaccination will TOTALLY be a reflection of how many employees will be diverted from routine daily activities. I love the UNMH program at “The Pit” that is staffed by students and all kinds of healthcare professionals, from MA’s to RN’s to PCP’s.
I think we are doing the best we can as a poor state, and I’m glad that when people voice concerns, they DOH is able to listen and shift gears.
socratic_me
On the off chance Cheryl will see this: I don’t know what the heck is going on in Santa Fe, because over the mountains in little LV, we run through 700 vaccines a day at the hospital in a system much like she describes expecting (though with no computer checking of details). They had a hard time managing lines at first and are still struggling with that some, but for the most part, they are rolling people through at a pace of one shot every minute or 2. As teachers, my wife and I will get our second shots on Saturday.
Misswhatsis
I’m in New Hampshire, group 1 b. Got notified Friday that I could sign up, signed up and got a slot for yesterday— first day of administration. So far so good.
Once I got the Jab the medic told me I could right away sign up for the second jab. So while I was waiting the regulation 15 minutes I tried to. The soonest and closest appointment was 8 weeks out and 50 miles away. There were no appointments available at the site where I got the first jab, which is already 30 miles from my house. Not one appointment.
This is not going well.