Poor guy... I hope he's able to get it soon. Supposedly, California's supply of vaccines is such that that's why they've opened up the eligibility groups.

I turn 51 in a few weeks and am hoping to get it as soon as I can. I'm hoping that I can get it through my doctor's office or through Rite Aid or something.

He was told he might be able to get one on a walk-up basis at the Oakland Coliseum but because it's Oakland, not SF, he may not qualify until April 15. The person who told him they were giving them walk-up said if he told a little fib about his job they wouldn't question it and he could qualify as an "essential worker". He actually did (until COVID) have a front-line, people-contact job but not one of the ones always mentioned. Anyway, if that doesn't work, I think the next best chance may be at a pharmacy like Rite Aid, CVS or Walgreen's. In a few weeks I'm hoping they have much more vaccine at such places.

Signs of the midnight curfew being lifted soon here. There have always been speakeasies, but places are openly flaunting the rule and have lines outside to get in post-1am now.

The US seems to be rapidly returning to “normal life” led of course by Florida and Texas.

working in the energy sector i was able to get my first vaccination pretty easily. its hard to find an appt. in st louis but i drove 1.5 hours sw down I-44 and theres tons of open appts and everyone can get vaccinated at this point down there if youre willing/able to drive. i dont know too many people who don’t at least have their first shot at this point.

Yeah, I hear e.g. Texas is opening up to all adults this week, but according to all the online maps, they have a relatively low fraction of people already vaccinated. I think some politicians may be trying to score points by opening it up to more people before there really is enough capacity. Or maybe people in Texas don't want to take the vaccine, or the population is a lot younger on average, I don't know...

From NYT:
https://i.imgur.com/onmlbLx.png

Two weeks is not enough, especially considering how horribly this roll out has been overall. It's going to be a mad rush for those 2 weeks before they open it up to everyone else. Only a small percentage of that age group will even get appointments before they're already pushed out.

California is averaging 370k vaccinations per day, so 5 million / 2 weeks. But ~half of that are going to be people getting their second dose. There are probably more than 2.5 million people who will be newly eligible, not to mention all the previously-eligible people who haven't been processed yet...

Anecdotally it appears my moms town in Arkansas (pop around 75k) is having an issue of getting enough people to get vaccinated. They had an event at the university and eventually said anyone who wants one can come and at Walmart yesterday they had someone outside asking if *anyone* wanted one.

Here in Chicago it seems quite different. On my colleges slack channel students appear very eager to get the vaccine but keep running into obstacles.

this is why i got my shot in the missouri ozarks. massive vaccination events with nobody else there except a (primarily) trickle of people driving down from st louis...it all took 20-25 minutes including the 15 minutes of observation afterwards.

^ yeah, I'm getting mine through work later today, but for my wife (who is eligible for health condition reasons), I had to autorefresh like 3 different websites and barely got it after many attempts.

It';s relatively easy to get an appointment at a CVS in e.g. Hoopeston or Pekin downstate, but renting a car and driving 2-3 hours each way on a weekday kind of sucks.

I was able to get an appointment as a goverment employee. It had a few annoyances, but I was able to book an one quite swiftly.

Starting tomorrow, New York will open up vaccine appointments to everyone 30 and above. Next week appointments will be opened to everyone 16+:

That's an odd graphic. Quite different from the one Bloomberg is showing which is more consistent with my experience. That is, I didn't have too much trouble getting my first shot back in January and my second in February in Arizona (and yes, the appointments were ultimately all taken--I don't detect much hesitancy, at least among the older crowd).

https://uniim1.shutterfly.com/ng/ser...049142/enhance
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/c...-distribution/

This graphic, current as of this morning, indicates Arizona with 23.4% "population coverage" and California at 22.8% (Texas, by the way, is 19.6%. Illinois 23.3%). A bit of explanation may be warranted: "“Population covered” divides the doses administered for each vaccine type by the number of doses required for full vaccination."

Opening vaccine appointments to all doesn't really do much when it's been very difficult to schedule appointments, because the main overarching issue is inadequate vaccine supply, or perhaps disproportionate allocation.

In fact, opening appointments to all makes it more difficult for those at higher risk for complications from COVID to get their shots. They're probably less savvy at using apps or even figuring out how to use the refresh button, to find out when appointment slots (which are very hard to come by in the Bay Area) open up.

They can prioritize appointments for higher risk people, even if they do open up appointments to everyone. Hopefully they designed the scheduling systems to do this... I can't believe they wouldn't have thought this out already.

While this might be technically possible, I don't think it's planned. The whole reason for "opening it up" is to make the available slots available to everyone. This would make sense if there were appointments restricted to certain groups going unused because there weren't enough such people left willing to be vaccinated. But I've seen no evidence that is the case anywhere I'm familiar with. Some comments above suggest it might be true in downstate Illinois or the Ozarks but in that case the sensible solution would be to distribute less vaccine to those areas and more to places people are lining up to take it, and there are still plenty of those in urban areas all over the country.

The good news is that I hope this opening up to younger ages will be accompanied by much more vaccine distributed to pharmacies. In today's WSJ they are reporting that the pharmacies getting vaccine will go from 17,000 to 40,000 nationally. To me, that makes more sense than mass vaccination centers with lines around the block. Make an appointment at your local pharmacy and get it there. This wasn't possible with the Pfizer vaccine that required special freezers but it should be with the Moderna and J&J vaccines.

Hopefully the government is monitoring areas that have higher vaccine uptake than others (doses administered divided by doses received). It’d be interesting to see this data across various states and the urban vs rural difference. This data is available locally and from what I can tell some jurisdictions are actually achieving higher doses administered than received due to the ability to draw more doses from the vials than originally determined by the drug manufacturer.

Being in the medical biz and having given many a shot (subcutaneous, IM and IV), I wouldn't want to be the person who got the dregs from the bottom of the vial. Just sayin'. Fortunately, with the 2-dose vaccines you can be pretty sure you weren't shorted on at least one dose.

If the vials are reconstituted using the proper volume of diluent (0.9% NaCl), it is perfectly acceptable to draw in some cases up to 7 doses. 6 doses is actually the current standard.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...say-s-n1251548

California appears to have stepped on the gas in mid-March:

https://uniim1.shutterfly.com/ng/ser...069916/enhance
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/c...-distribution/