Covid Support Thread
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Yeah, I am definitely not making any plans until several months from now, but I was a little taken aback that my husband is ready to sign up for multiple plane trips even if our kid can’t be vaccinated yet – and visiting my mom requires a layover. Some of you may recall that my daughter had a positive covid test last fall, but it was a rapid test and not a PCR, and my husband and I didn’t get sick or test positive so we aren’t sure whether she actually had it. Even if she did she may not still have antibodies (we decided to forgo the blood draw to test). But he’s all like, it’s not usually a severe illness for children! Coronaviruses have been around forever! And I’m like, WE DON’T KNOW THE LONG TERM EFFECTS! PEOPLE ARE HAVING HEART ATTACKS MONTHS AFTER RECOVERY, ROAAARRR and my kid is like, I’m going to have a heart attack?! So…hopefully we can just shelve this discussion for awhile.
My mom is 64 (65 in September) so she just misses that cutoff – but has kidney disease so she is high risk. New Mexico is doing a good job, though, so I can be patient. They’re supposed to be contacting people to make appointments when vaccine is available. After reading about all the shenanigans people are going through to get appointments for their parents, I called her to ask, did you register? Did you do it right? Are you checking your email? And she’s like, do you think I don’t got this? I’m not feeble!
So I used to work in state politics and met A LOT of people during the 8 years I did. So I’m friends with someone pretty high up at our state department of health and he gave me sort of a rundown on why my state (and many onthers) is having issues with vaccine distribution and the need for mass clinics. Another friend of mine is actually in charge of organizing the large mass vaccine locations in the state and he is NOT being paid enough for that gargantuan effort (roughly 25-30 sites around the state each week).
Apparently each state gets a set amount of shots/doses per week. My state gets approx 75k shots each week. For the 3 million eligible people in my state it would take 40 weeks to distribute all the doses. The state health department finds out on Tuesday nights how many doses they can order on Thursday and is sort of the middle man who determines which places get what allotment (meaning the department of health never actually possesses the shots.) First responders and health care workers got the first rounds and now we are on to the tier one folks. Hospitals are getting about half the allotment of shots. According to my friend, some providers are just sitting on the shots, keeping them in freezers and not giving them out because they think they won’t have enough for the second dose so the health department had to start threatening to advertise who had the shots – and miraculously they started giving out the doses.
So in some cases, it doesn’t even seem to be the state running the show, it’s providers hoarding the doses until they feel comfortable giving them out, which is not how it was supposed to work AT ALL. Also according to my friend ” the Trump administration created so much confusion on vax supply that everyone got spooked. Things are going smoother now.”
Just an FYI for anyone curious why the distribution seems so slow or why the states are having so many issues.
Things are a mess. I live in a state that’s in the lowest 5 out of 50 in % of population vaccinated. My parents live in a separate state that is also in the lowest 5. Each individual state has their own criteria to break up the population into priority tiers. My Mom is in her 70s with 3 pre-existing conditions, and she’s in Tier 2 in her state. I’m in tier 1B in my state with only 1 pre-existing condition. The health department has a questionnaire people can fill out and they claim they will then contact you when your tier comes up so you can schedule a vaccine. But they don’t seem to actually be contacting people. My tier has come up and I haven’t heard anything. Same with my parents in the next state over. A lot of older people are just waiting for the health department to get back to them in vain or checking with just their local pharmacies and hospitals to see if they have vaccines, and that isn’t going to work.
I had to call and explain to my Mom that her tier was up even though she hadn’t been contacted and that if we weren’t proactive about getting her vaccinated her state’s current vaccine supply could be used up on people who were less at risk before she gets hers. We need to look for places that have the vaccine throughout the state and be willing to drive up to a few hours if she’s to get vaccinated any time soon. My parent’s state made a tool this week that lists all the pharmacies, hospitals, etc. in the entire state and whether they have actually received any vaccines yet, which helps enormously. I’m hoping my state will get something like that up eventually. In my state, only 50% of doses are going to hospitals and mass vaccination sites and the rest are all to individual pharmacies, and you have to call every pharmacy around one by one and ask if they’ve even received anything yet, which most haven’t. Once I found my way through an online labyrinth and got the map of what places carry the vaccine in my parent’s state right now and how to contact them I sent that along to my Mom and showed her how to use it despite how wonky it is. She’s going to call each place that’s received vaccines to check if they still have any available, give them her health info, and see if she can get an appointment. Fingers crossed she can get one soon.
I lucked out and got an appointment at a mass vaccination site in my state that’s only an hour drive away. My sister-in-law is a nurse at a hospital and has been able to get both of her vaccines and use her connections to get some of her elderly/higher risk family vaccinated, too. My Dad is high risk and works at a public school and is getting his soon through the school. My husband is young and doesn’t have any pre-existing conditions that apply to this, so we reckon he’ll be vaccinated in the summer. My husband and I have agreed not to start socializing, going out, etc. until he is fully vaccinated as well so it will be still be some time before I can see people again. I’m hoping that by the end of summer I’ll actually be able to hug my parents again. Before Covid I would visit them each week (they are just across the state border, it isn’t a long drive). My sister lives with my parents and has said she is not going to get vaccinated (she’s an adult and can make her own decisions…still grr!) but besides her and my niece everyone else in our households should be vaccinated by the end of summer.
Yeah, I really don’t blame states at all for struggling here – this is a massive effort that the Federal government really should have been driving since day one. To say nothing of the fact that the same people that were supposed to implement vaccines WERE ALSO having to combat a major surge.
So, no, I definitely don’t fault state and local entities, or even providers really, because they were set up by Trump to fail.
None-the-less, it’s a mess. I think it’s getting better, I’m glad we have a new administration that is taking it seriously and trying to turn it around, but we started in a really really bad place so that’s all relative.
Biden’s been in office less than three weeks and he’s already:
1. Improved vaccination rates by 15%
2. Established the first set of federal vaccination sites
3. Improved tracking of shipments, allocation and tracking of vaccinationsWe had more than 9 months to prepare for this and the Federal Government put all of their energy into supply chain tracking – which is great, but is 1/12th of the whole picture. They could have had a task force made up of army logistics, pharma supply chain experts, hospital representatives and public health experts and come up with a clear plan for distribution and execution of the plan.
But you know – it’s a hoax that’s going away.
On the bright side – the AZ vaccine will likely be approved soon, it’s been approved in the EU, but the EU is like “MINE!” and demanding all the doses. And J&J submitted yesterday so that’ll go through it’s paces over the next month. That translates into a ramp up of options and doses and while AZ and J&J aren’t as effective as Moderna and Pfizer, something is better than nothing. If offered either, I’d be happy to take it.
And while we won’t be buying any of the Sputnik vaccine, it is showing benefit and so globally, another working vaccine makes the world safer.
Yeah, it sounds like there’s going to be a slower expansion of vaccination in March after J&J is initially approved and then more in April as J&J and Moderna/Pfizer ramp up and potentially AZ is approved. Hopefully we’ll have, if not a normal summer, something that is qualitatively better than life now. I had hoped it might be safe to do with extended family but it looks like it’s going to be a few more months before it’s plausible.
The AZ and J&J vaccines don’t need nearly the special treatment that Moderna and Pfizer vaccines require. Hopefully they can distribute to more remote places and get it into arms.
If we hit 100M vaccinated in March/April – that’s still about 30% of the country. If we can get another 100M by June, then yes, somewhat of a return to normal, assuming that variants are managed by existing vaccines. And by managed I mean, you might get sick but you won’t die.
And again, I reiterate what I consider a perfectly reasonable approach to those who can, but choose not to get vaccinated: You get sick, too fucking bad. You don’t get a hospital bed, you don’t get an ICU bed. Fuck you.
I’ve officially volunteered myself to help my mom get a vaccine appointment and have been trying to figure out what’s going on in her state. A friend there gave me some intel for how she has been helping her older relatives get set up with appointments, but my parents’ area seems more competitive than where her grandma lives. In any case, I’ll be waking up bright & early on Mondays moving forward to make the calls I’ve been told work.
My state is currently in phase 1(b) of vaccine distributions and I found out I should be eligible when we hit phase 1(c). Even if this turns out to not be the case or the guidance for our next phase changes, telling myself that maybe it could be as early as next month makes me feel better. Our winter is NOT the mild one I was hoping for and I’m clinging to anything hopeful at this point.
LisForLeslie, regarding “And by managed I mean, you might get sick but you won’t die.”….based on what I’ve read in the NYT and Washington Post, that does seem to be the case with most if not all vaccine trials. Out of the approximately 30,000 people who participated in the Moderna/Pfizer trials, some people still got sick, but ZERO (!!) participants were hospitalized with, or died from, covid. Vaccine trials in South Africa are proving similar results despite a lower vaccine efficacy (57% I believe was the number)….meaning nobody was hospitalized or died. So that’s pretty encouraging!
That said, it’s still unknown whether you can still spread covid despite being vaccinated. But you definitely won’t be as sick as you might’ve gotten without the vaccine.
@Copa, I still don’t think anyone’s had luck getting my Gramma a vaccine (she’s in Kane County). I’m in the same tier as she is, but honestly, I’m not going out of my way to get it with all the madness, figure I’ll save it for the teachers for now.. maybe in a month things will be easier?
But I really really want my gramma vaccinated. Plus, Kane County isn’t vaccinated breastfeeding women? WtfSo, City of Chicago just released an RFP to help the City stand up vaccination sites on Chicago’s East and West sides, so poor, economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. I’m not sure why in the hell they’re just now doing it, but whatever.
My company led the infrastructure components at McCormick (which was never used), so we’re chasing this RFP. We actually talked to the Mayor’s office about this back in, IDK, Nov or Dec.
Anywho… there’s some more Chicago info. for you.
The schedule is to stand up these sites first week of March.
I’m not sure how much luck people in Chicago will have for a while. I’m also curious if it will be like other cities, where wealthy white people travel to these sites and flood them making it harder for the people who need the vaccines the most.
