I agree it has been slow going in getting vaccines in arms. But I also agree it will start to speed up as we roll into January. My opinion the reason for the slow roll out is because of the facilities and people getting the first vaccinations. They are bringing it to those people, at the hospitals or long term care facilities (due to the constraints of the first vaccines available). My hope is that as we move into the next phase of people to get the vaccine the states can make more of a coordinated effort for mass vaccine clinics. My fear is there is not this kind of coordination at the state/local level and they are going to rely more on the approach of the flu vaccine each year, where the individual person goes into a retail pharmacy to get vaccinated. This is highly inefficient in vaccinating a large amount of the public in a short amount of time. I think of it this way, they start advertising the flu shot is available in late August. I see more and more advertisements on tv in September. A few people get their flu vaccine in August or September. You see a lot more people getting their flu vaccine in October, November, December and January. And we are talking about only 50% of the public getting the flu vaccine in a standard year. If we take this kind of approach yes it will take sometime until late 2021 before 50% of the public is vaccinated for Covid since it requires 2 shots. I would like to see mass vaccination clinics run by the states to ramp up shots in arms in the Spring instead.
I am a military spouse and live on a military base and receive my health care from a military treatment facility on base. For the past 14 years I have always received my flu vaccine at base mass vaccination clinics they hold in the Fall. I remember 2009 with H1N1 outbreak and how we had to go back to get a booster that Spring. I was living at a large military base that serviced a very large population of active duty/dependents and retirees in the area. They set up these clinics that started at 6am and ran all day until 6pm. They broke it up into 2 locations on base and depending on your last name A-M,N-Z you went to your designated location. We stood in line, filled out our paperwork while in line, then when we got to the front, they checked our ID and you moved down the walkway until you got to a waiting corpsman, there were like 30 of them per location, who gave you the shot, they spent about 1 minute on each person. They were able to vaccinate over 1,000 people per hour. So imagine one location vaccinating 12-15,000 people in one day. And they had two of those locations in the same day on base. I don't know any CVS location that sees 24,000 people and can vaccinate them in a 12 hour day. This is the kind of coordinated effort I would love to see from our states/local areas. I would think since they are contracting this out to CVS/Walgreens you can even use those people at these mass vaccination clinics. You have to do them at a large popular location for each individual area, such as a school gymnasium on a weekend when the school is not open or a convention center, football stadium, sports center/arena. A place with plenty of parking and space so you can spread the people out by 6ft and also move them to an area after vaccination to wait the 20-30 minutes after the shot. Kind of like these mass early voting locations you see in large cities, that would be a great way to get the most amount of people as possible vaccinated once they open up to people who can go to a location to get their shot. This could even be scaled up for a lot more than the 24,000 people they vaccinated that 1 day at the base back in 2009. Each states National Guard could coordinate this kind of mass event, they do practice/train for this kind of thing.
Again, all just my opinion and wish for this rollout to see as many people as possible get this vaccine as soon as possible. This really is a hair on fire situation and the response needs to be a hair on fire response. Hopefully states see how slow it is going so far and start making plans to ramp things up in January when we get much more vaccine supplied. But in any case, I am super happy to see vaccinations happening, whatever the speed they are happening at this point. A vaccine in less then a year is amazing!
