I booked an appointment yesterday (first day I was eligible) for lunch today at a mass vaccination site run by UAB. Unfortunately for my wife, she will have to wait for a call back since she wasn’t an existing patient. Federal pharms nearby are out for next week (as long as they will let you schedule) and county is on a call back as well.
I think that is exactly what I said.
I forget exactly, but I think it’s fewer people than NY eligibility, but I think that Washington might be changing the rules for eligibility to be county specific rather than state specific because of this issue. I bet they are totally wasting vaccine though.
Alright, in NC and apparently eligible. I checked on the NCDHHS portal thingy for available appointments in my area and the website basically responded with “baaahahaha, good luck bro”.
I guess I’ll just wait longer?
Looking at later stories, the medical ethics board found him not guilty.
I take the ethics board clearing him as pretty good evidence that he did nothing wrong, at least i’d you agree with the principle that he should not let vaccines expire.
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I forget where I read this, so apologies if it was here, and I don’t know if this is 100% true or just someone’s speculation, but I remember reading that the machines that fill the vials have something like a 10% error tolerance, so they set them to fill a 5-dose vial with 5.5 doses, to ensure they actually get 5 doses. That means there’s also a chance to get 6 doses from one vial, and very likely to get 11 doses instead of 10 from 2 vials.
Again, I can’t vouch for how accurate this is. 
The other thing I read is that there is dead space in the syringe. And some syringes have more dead space than others. So the vials are filled with enough excess for “standard” syringes, but if you use fancy syringes with less dead space, you can reliably squeak out an extra dose. (at least from the 10 dose vials)
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I was able to get an appointment for the vaccine tomorrow. I’ve been eligible for a couple weeks now, but appointments have been fully booked online unless I wanted to drive ~200 miles.
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I have this friend. His mother died from cancer recently, and he got fired from his job. So, now he’s road tripping around the country to heal or some such. Anyway, he’s not vaccinated and doesn’t qualify yet. I’m calling said road trip his COVID tour. People like him are precisely why they need to open it up already.
unless there’s enough vaccine to actually get it, it doesn’t do any good to open it up. It just means that people spend more time fighting for the same number of appointments.
my point is, i’m not sure their criteria as to who is worthy and who isn’t makes sense at this point.
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To some extent, just having an order, so the people at the front of the “line” can actually act on that, is better than a free-for-all. Most states are using an order that’s better than a random number generator. But at least in my state, even a random number generator would be better than a free-for-all.
(And I just poked around on CVS’s “find my vaccine” site. It looks like I’d be eligible in most states, but few states are open to everyone, yet. And most of the states have very limited availability of appointments, or no appointments.)
We’ll have the free for all soon enough. Hopefully, a bunch more people will have been vaccinated by then.
I mean, if you are right and there are lots of places that can’t find eligible people to jab, then yeah, they should open more. But I don’t think that’s generally true.
That being said, I’ve recently put myself on waiting lists in a couple of places for “leftover vaccine to use up today”.
I am hoping to do this soon. I think a lot of the sites open up appointments at midnight for that furthest day out that they schedule. I had walmart options available until around lunchtime today but were ~100 miles away. If I wake up in the middle of the night I’ll log in to check if there is something closer to the city that is less than an hour drive. If I don’t land anything this week I might just take on the longer hour drive before my state opens up to all residents.
I read an article earlier that one Trump county was allocated more doses than residents. They were supposed to go to a large event that neighboring counties would also attend, but in the end a large share of the doses were given to other far away counties. They are running out of people to take shots with only around 15% of the population vaccinated in some of these areas.
Yeah but if appointments are going un-filled then they aren’t allowing enough people into the line.
i think it’s ridiculous that someone 30 years younger than me is prioritized ahead of me somewhat due to their poor choices in life.
and at this point, in new york, the majority of people ARE eligible with the addition of people over 50. so open it up to everyone already.
They ain’t going unfilled where i live, and i doubt they are in NYC, either.
I’m still waiting to become eligible, too.
I’m not a girl but thanks for thinking I am.
That’s 100% true. I don’t know if people are just bad at math or what, but the number of administered doses per vial is more than the number of reported doses per vial. I don’t even know. But yea, that’s completely true.
My thoughts on people who want a shot.
If you’ve been waiting it out in your home for the past year, keep waiting. You will get your turn. If your parent or grandparent is vaccinated, you can go ahead and hug them. Otherwise, keep on keeping on.
If you’ve been going to restaurants or parties this whole time, then lie. Seriously. Just lie. Say you’re 65, or whatever. Your cavalier lifestyle is putting everyone at risk. Just lie and get the shot.
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Maybe you should book a flight to Arizona. They have opened to everyone over 15. And while the press release suggests that the intention is to only vaccinate “Arizonans”, the CVS vaccine-booking website doesn’t list “must live or work in the state” in its requirements for AZ, and when I checked earlier this morning, it claimed there were appointments available in Tuscon and one other city.