Everyone is just waiting

[pameladean]

For a long time I did not used to go to bed early. For the last week I have not gotten into bed much before five a.m.

The 24-hour registration period for people over 65 to pre-register for the upcoming week's vaccine lottery runs from 5 a.m. today until five a.m. tomorrow. Fine, I thought, I'll just get on there a bit before 5 and get it done. I was more than ready for bed by four, naturally, but I stuck it out. When I get up in what passes for my morning,  there is a whole flurry of things to do; and I didn't know exactly when I would actually be able to start waiting again.

I hit the waiting room at 5:03 a.m. and there were 7200 and some odd people ahead of me in line. Estimated waiting time: more than an hour.

I am waiting, so far. I don't have anything to do right now except to go to bed. No medication left to take or administer, no showering or dressing or making tea and breakfast, no looking through the recipes for dinner, no checking email. Well, I am checking it, but I don't get much at this hour, not being in regular correspondence with people in extremely different time zones.

Aha. Estimated waiting time: 57 minutes. Number of people ahead of me: 4831.

The number goes down in little bursts. I wonder how many people are leaving the line, not having been able to allot a long enough wait.

Sandy Denny is singing "Who Knows Where the Time Goes?"

Estimated waiting time: 13 minutes. Number of people ahead of me: 3821. It has not been close to an hour, let alone more than one. I'm starting to feel bad for all the people dropping out. They probably don't have the luxury of staying home, or have to wrangle kids, or both. I'm still here, though.

The moon is not technically down, but I can't see it. I don't know what the Pleiades are doing.

Eight minutes, 2769 people.

Fairport Convention is performing "Sloth."

All right, I'm done. They want you to use the mouse to sign the form. It looked as if I'd done it with a very blunt pencil on a wobbly table, even after several attempts. It will have to do.

Forty-six minutes from start to finish. I am now able to be picked randomly to schedule an appointment for the first of two shots. But it's a start.

Bob Dylan was singing "Shelter from the Storm" while I was filling out the form, and now, in a You-Tube video I am still really excited about, is singing "Love Minus Zero, No Limits" with George Harrison, Ringo Starr, and Leon Russell playing backup; this performance is part of the Concert for Bangladesh in August of 1971 and I will cherish for some time my vague thoughts, on first stumbling across it, of, "I don't think that was his usual band at the time if he had one; wow, they are really good; the guy with the tambourine looks really familiar; WHO ARE THOSE GUYS?"

Sleep well, all, and may we all have a way to be vaccinated soon.

Pamela

Comments

[pameladean]

I put that all on the Republicans. Minnesota doesn't have enough vaccine, because Trump, and was also getting a lot of criticism for not rolling out the vaccine they do have fast enough. This lets an additional group of people get vaccinated. Last week they tried first-come, first-serve instead of a random selection, and the resulting rush crashed the website and broke the phone system.

The only state I've read about doing it well so far is West Virginia.

P.

[dreamshark]

Oh, c'mon. I don't like Republicans either, but the reason there isn't enough vaccine is because there isn't enough vaccine. Vaccine supplies were allocated by state based purely on population, not by Trumpish whim. I'm sure Moderna and Pfizer are cranking it out as fast as they can (because why wouldn't they?) but there just isn't very much available yet. Which was okay at the start because the states needed a few weeks to shake out the daunting logistics of vaccine distribution and get the pipeline full. So I think all the potential bottlenecks are fairly well balanced right now, which is about the best you can hope for with something this complicated.

It's not really true that West Virginia is doing a stellar job and everybody else is crap. There's an obvious pattern across the states - the bigger the state population the longer it is taking to get up to speed with vaccine distribution. States with small, mostly rural populations are doing the best. California, with a population larger than a mid-size country, is having the hardest time. So if you want to get partisan about it, it's the Republican states that are doing the best right now. Guess who's at the top of the list today for vaccine distribution? North Dakota, that's who.

I agree that last week's website debacle was embarrassing, but they seem to have recovered from it with remarkable aplomb. I was very impressed with the website I saw today. And even more impressed to hear that if too many people hit the website at once you were placed in an orderly wait queue with accurate updates. That's a much better design than just crashing the site every time it got too busy.

[pameladean]

There have been multiple failures by the Trump administration. The Trump administration turned down the chance to order an additional 100 million doses from Pfizer. It couldn't keep track of what it was doing: this may be some kind of stupid bookkeeping, or outright cupidity, or a mixture, but there are about 20 million doses that can't be accounted for at all. In the last week or so of the Trump administration, states were complaining that they were getting thirty or forty percent fewer vaccines per week than promised, which had upended their plans and caused them to have to cancel a lot of appointments. Trump administration officials blamed the states, then blamed Pfizer for production problems, which Pfizer said they didn't have. Pfizer said they had doses sitting in warehouses and had stopped getting directions from the federal government about where to send them.

Also, as far as "why wouldn't they produce vaccine as fast as they can," well, back at the beginning of the pandemic, the owner of at least one company that makes N95 masks said they had a production line they could use to make more, but unless the government asked them to and they had the guarantee of being paid, they wouldn't be starting it up. Trump wouldn't invoke the Defense Production Act, so those masks weren't manufactured or distributed to healthcare workers. Pfizer might operate under similar principles. Corporations aren't really very benign overall.

I feel perfectly comfortable blaming Republicans. There could have been more doses available to the US sooner and somebody could actually have kept track of them.

P.