Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

The NFL offer seems to be about marketing as much as anything. Dovetails with having 7,500 vaccinated first responders at the Super Bowl today.

NFL doesn't have vaccines. They don't have personnel to administer and support giving vaccines. Don't have systems in place for scheduling, tracking, etc. But they do have physical locations with at least some advantages. Not being used right now (other than 1 being used today). Baseball parks, convention centers and other large public spaces are the same. Discusion about public funding of stadiums (particularly football stadiums which are used 10-15 times or so per year for football) often discuss other uses. This would be one. They are set up to move large numbers of people in and out so you can have people waiting while distanced. They have large open spaces where you can set up tents/cubicles to administer vaccines and have people wait (again distanced) to see if there are any adverse reactions. Large sites can also have medical personnel on site to deal with any adverse reactions (my dad getting a vaccine at the hotel connected to Cleveland Clinic's main campus was about as good as you can get for that). Small pharmacies don't have that capacity. Certain of the stadiums/convention centers are located on or near public transportation routes which is helpful for those without transportation. Not always true though depending on the venue.

Having a large number of places with a small number of vaccines available is what Ohio is doing right now and its creating the Hunger Games scenario. People are calling/logging onto a number of locations and signing up for vaccines. You only get one vaccine (2 doses though) so its not helpful if multiple locations over a number of days/weeks say they have an appointment available for you. Ideally you would call to cancel or remove your name from other location waiting lists but few will actually do that. So time will be wasted reaching out to you and potentially holding appointments for people who were already vaccinated. Large sites like NFL stadiums would have the benefit of only needing to register with one location (presumably the stadiums would partner with local hospital that would handle the administration and scheduling).

Ideally, the answer would be all of the above. Use large facilities and smaller locations. Spread out across the country so all areas get needed coverage/availability. But you would have a universal registration system (on a county, state or even national level) so people only need to register once. And they would get notices that we have slots available on these dates/times and at these locations (which would include NFL stadiums, local pharmacies, grocery stores, etc). You would also have to deal with technology access issues. And issues with trying to get what are competitors to work together. Medical records companies (like Epic) would seem like good candidates to be involved in that process (though there are competitors in that industry as well).

Pharmacies are paid about $20 to administer vaccines (not necessarily Covid vaccines but vaccines in general). Some insurance companies pay for vaccines themselves and administration. Some just pay for the vaccine leaving the customer/patient to pay for administration. The $20 means it makes sense to offer coupons/discounts to people getting vaccines. Bring them into the store (and make them walk to the back where the pharmacy is located passing many shelves with other products on their way in and out). And the pharmacies definitely wanted in on the administration dollars for Covid vaccines.

Right now from what I have seen, availability of the vaccines themselves are the biggest bottleneck. More an issue than distribution. But there are distribution issues as well. Herding cats type of process. Willing arms is not an issue right now. But as we move forward towards summer, I expect that willing arms will become the biggest issue.

kpjb said:

In PA, you need to schedule an appointment to get the shots so there's not any issue with having not enough or too many. They're all accounted for as soon as they confirm that they'll have delivery.

Well, I know for a fact that some appointments are being scheduled and then not kept. There's apparently "a thing" where you wait outside a vaccination site, even though you aren't supposed to be getting one, and at the end of the day, any shots that didn't get into arms and are going to go to waste go to the people waiting.

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/coronavirus/vaccine-hunters-make-su...e/2461013/

GoBucks89 said:

A lot of good stuff

I like to think if we hadn't had the administration in place that we did up until last month, something that looked like this would have been implemented in as many areas as possible when the vaccines were ready.

ApolloAndy said:

There's apparently "a thing" where you wait outside a vaccination site, even though you aren't supposed to be getting one, and at the end of the day, any shots that didn't get into arms and are going to go to waste go to the people waiting.

Yup. It's happening here in Florida too. People are showing up at 6AM and waiting all day to hopefully get a missed appointment. On the news the other night these two ladies had been waiting 3 days and still no luck.

Jeff said:

It's not a country, it's a US territory, with a governor. The people living there are American citizens.

Not really the point of my post even a little bit, but, I guess, thanks? My bad?

I stand by my post. What they are doing is working.

99er said:

Yup. It's happening here in Florida too. People are showing up at 6AM and waiting all day to hopefully get a missed appointment. On the news the other night these two ladies had been waiting 3 days and still no luck.

Sounds like trying to buy pc parts.

I’m eligible starting tomorrow and still no appointment. I guess I’m guilty of trying to schedule as many locations as possible, but the minute I land an appointment I’ll stop looking.
Here in Ohio we have a large site at our state fairgrounds. It’s drive through and there are three stations, one for check in then drive to the next one for the shot then drive to the next one for your 15 minute rest. All without leaving the car. It’s available through the dept of health and they will be one of the first ones I check tomorrow. I spoke to the nurse at the urgent care in the Kroger store today and she said she didn’t know about availability at the fairgrounds but somehow thought people had good luck getting in. She also said that they had none there at Kroger. My CVS said that they had none and have yet to administer their first shot. He said he heard the Whitehall location was getting vaccines. Which leads me to wonder how f’d up it is that even from one CVS to another nobody knows what’s going on.

Had an interesting chat with some healthcare workers. Said vaccines are routinely being stolen out of their clinics and hospitals. Not sure if they carry any weight or not. But that’s the statements they made.

You’ll all be very happy to know I found a shot. Actually after trying all morning it was my partner who discovered availability at the Kroger in Circleville, Ohio, about 30-40 minutes south of where I live. The day was Thursday but in the time it took him to get me registered the appointments filled up through Friday. So Saturday is my day and I guess I’m officially a Vaccine Chaser.
Lord, watch and look after me until then, lol.

I think you mean until six weeks from Saturday, what with the second dose and development of immunity.

Oh, absolutely. I plan to remain careful and resist dry humping at least until then.

On the subject of large vs. small distribution sites, our area saw a massive distribution site open up at Texas Motor Speedway (local NASCAR track) last week. It's being billed as the largest distribution site in the state and the country, because Texas. They vaccinated 22,000 people in 3 days last week and are expecting to vaccinate 27,000 this week. They are reporting that the only wait so far is the post vaccine 15 minute wait and the 2 people I know that went there confirmed that.

My mother (67) is in western PA and got her first shot this evening. She went to the local hospital.

She told me the woman that gave her the shot said that location did around 1200 today. This is in a small town of less than 15,000.

Forget Epic. Just need a mom on maternity leave:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/08/us/olivia-adams-ma-covid-vaccine-web...index.html

Surprisingly good news on the vaccine front.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/08/covid-vaccine-scott-gottlieb-expect...in-us.html

The video interview was more informative than the article. Gottlieb is a former FDA Commissioner and is a current board member at Pfizer. Gottlieb (who again is a board member at Pfizer so has a clue what's going on) said we'll have 220M doses presumably between Pfizer and Moderna by the end of March - and another 30-40M from J&J by end of March. I get it Pfizer and Moderna is a 2 shot vaccine and it's now abundantly clear vaccines distributed do not mean vaccines in arms, although we are a heck of a lot better about that now than we were a month ago and all indications are that's only going to ramp up significantly.... but the 18+ population in the US is only 210M .... so we'll have enough vaccine by the end of March to fully vaccinate appx 140M of the 210M adult Americans.

GoBucks89 said:

Forget Epic. Just need a mom on maternity leave:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/08/us/olivia-adams-ma-covid-vaccine-web...index.html

My various friends in the business have talked about this extensively. It's not clear how government tends to contract with the worst possible vendors to build this stuff, when we know what it actually takes.

Knowing what I know about politicians and government, it doesn't surprise me.

Lord Gonchar said:

My mother (67) is in western PA and got her first shot this evening. She went to the local hospital.

Most people around the DFW area have been given appointments through government distribution points at convention centers and neighborhood rec centers. I'm hearing more and more of people getting it through hospitals. My mother in law got hers at one of the large local hospital chain locations, but she had to drive 30 minutes away to get it. That was arranged through her doctor. My mom had heard that a hospital close to where they live was giving the vaccine to walk in patients if you had certain risk factors. She probably directed a dozen of her friends there that couldn't get scheduled through the regular channels.

There's been a lot of talk about the logistics around here especially after Dallas had a debacle during the last weekend in January at the downtown convention center. It was a drive through distribution and thousands of people without appointments showed up and turned traffic into a nightmare. People without appointments were turned away and people with appointments gave up because of the gridlock. One advantage to consolidating distribution to large centers like NASCAR tracks and stadiums is that they typically have people on hand that know a little about moving large numbers of people and traffic quickly. I heard that Boston had brought in staff from the marathon to consult on logistics and that makes a lot of sense. The running joke in this part of the country is that the people in charge of the Chick-Fil-A drive through at lunch should run the vaccine distribution.

Interesting what they are doing with schools; at least here in Ohio. We got a call that our daughters will be off school on Tuesday (they already had Monday off), because that is a "vaccine day" for the teachers. Monday-Tuesday, all in one swoop, round one completed for every teacher/staff member. That seems to be the way in Ohio...methodically going district by district. Seems like a smart approach.

Similar with us. This Friday is the 1st shot day for our schools; we always have a 4 day weekend for President's Day so no extra day off for us. School system just announced that the 2nd shot day is Friday, March 5. School will be closed that day so there will be 1 extra day off.

Our superintendent said 80% of eligible staff are signed up. That seems unexpectedly high to me. I was only guessing around 60% would do it.