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CVS announces limited vaccine program at limited number of drugstores
By adamg on Tue, 02/02/2021 - 2:01pm
CVS announced today it has 21,600 doses of one of the two approved Covid-19 vaccines, which it will begin administering at 18 of its Massachusetts drugstores on Feb. 11 to people meeting the current Massachusetts phase eligibility. The company said appointments will available starting Feb. 9 through its Web site and app. It did not provide details on just which stores.
CVS said it will expand shots as more vaccine becomes available.
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Comments
once again, hardly helpful.
Would it be a burden to actually detail which stores in advance? For those of us who are trying to get elderly friends and relatives to a inoculation site, why the delay in opening up a portal to merely make an appointment? February 9? So many questions...
Agreed. Trying to figure out
Agreed. Trying to figure out how to get my 81 year old, cancer surviving mother a shot, while working full time, has been futile at best.
Are they calling people? Got
Are they calling people? Got call this morning claiming to be from cvs customer service. I hung up before they said anything. Cvs does not have the number they called. Assumed it was scam.
So Many Questions
So Many Complaints........
By the way, I got an appointment for an elderly relative in 20 minutes in a Boston site after going online. Even sooner if she wanted to go to Foxboro.
Get off your arse and do the work if you want something earlier. It is amazing what you can accomplish by trying and doing in this life.
Well
It helps if you have a computer.
It helps if you have time to search through a lot of messy unnecessary confusing screens.
It helps if you have someone who has the time and ability to do this for you.
It helps if you have a car or someone to drive you.
It helps if you aren't working during the available hours.
It helps if you aren't clicking through 15 screens to find out that the site is full.
Herd immunity isn't about individual people navigating a clusterfuck so they can then feel special and industrious for being able to game their privilege to get an immunity prize. These are all barriers to the greater goal: vaccinate nearly everybody as quickly as possible. The system needs to change and needs to be fixed and there are people working on this.
Its too bad the people
Its too bad the people whining about equitable access didn't spend the same energy on ensuring the elderly are vaccinated ahead of a hospitals work from home staff.
Or work from home, home health workers. Yeah, they already got their chance ahead of the elderly too. Makes sense.
Home health workers?
You have a problem with that? WTF would you have a problem with that? People moving from household to household working with the elderly are a high risk group and high risk of spread group. Sheesh.
Do you have any data to back up your claims for hospital "work from home" staff? Some were called in so as to not waste vaccine when that extra dose was discovered, but they are not a priority and not part of group 1 unless they are rotating into and out of the office. The data I see (not publicly available) show this as a very minimal group.
Check your data
I've seen claims (not fact-checked) that 100% of the payroll at BIDMC (including, say, people who work from home answering phones in the purchasing department) have been vaccinated.
Check your facts
Seems it's on you to check your facts first before demanding that someone else "check your data".
I have no access
She has access to non-public data; I do not.
Anecdote
Is not data.
My fiancé is a home health
My fiancé is a home health worker, working from home that was eligible for the shot because of that role. Confirmed and reconfirmed via a formal letter by her employer.
Any social work early intervention etc agency in the state right now is 99.9% remote, and all are eligible for the shot. There is a pretty substantial number of people in this group, particularly when you include hospital stay at home employees.
Yeah, she got the shot. Take it when eligible IMO.
Adding more anecdata
Two community health agencies and one hospital with which I have contracts have said that all employees and contractors are considered Tier 1 and can get letters just by sending our info to the HR person in charge of doing that. All of the places have a fairly even mix of folks who should actually be Tier 1 based on the guidelines, folks like me who are providers who can pretty much work entirely by Zoom if we're proactive and creative, and operations folks who mostly don't ever have to be on site or deal with the public.
Oof.
Oof.
So you're saying that people in hospital administration that possibly haven't left their homes in months could get vaccinated already?
And the K-12 teachers who have been teaching from home are lobbying to be further prioritized (they are already in phase 2, I have no issue with that), but student facing, university level instructors and staff are explicitly put into phase 3 with the general public.
Makes perfect fucking sense. I'm not mad, just disappointed.
I don't care who has "access"
As of right now 40% of shots are sitting on the shelf in Massachusetts. That's maddening and it's costing people lives.
Prioritize groups but if the shots can't be distributed to those people quickly, give them to the next in line or just to people randomly. The more people who get inoculated, the quicker this will be over.
Amazingly, some people would rather see shots expire than someone "jump the line".
There's a nuance being lost here
On the one hand: By all means get those shots into people's arms. And, if you have doses that are about to expire, get them into the arms of anyone you can find rather than let them go to waste.
On the other hand, if there are large numbers of doses being dispensed randomly so as to avoid them going to waste, then that's suggestive that the system may be somewhat of a clusterfuck.
It is a clusterfuck
There was no guidance and no commitment from the Federal government until January 21.
There are still not enough doses in the right places.
Still not enough doses in the right places?
Please expound on this.
MA was allocated 100K doses by Jan 1
That was cut to 40K for no apparent reason and only about half that actually shipped.
Also, the Pfizer vaccine is limited to facilities with a -80C freezer unit, and can only be shipped from in 975 dose amounts. It cannot be broken up into smaller numbers than that.
I know complicated logistics is tricky, but do try to wrap your head around that.
Again
Where are the “right places”?
You have an odd sense of priorities
Do you have actual evidence that non-patient facing staff are getting vaccinated ahead of "the elderly"?
Maybe you should save your outrage for the decision that prioritized all the cops ahead of "the elderly".
Home health workers often see multiple patients. As such, they're one of the more likely source of disease transmission to vulnerable people. Vaccinate one home health worker, you protect multiple elderly people. Don't vaccinate them? They bring covid into the home, and vulnerable patients die. This is how my aunt died.
https://www.npr.org/2021/01
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/29/961230714/why-young-healthy-researchers-a...
Home health workers are ALSO working remotely at the moment.
Yet they are ahead of the elderly. Makes sense.
Edit: Please note that at no point did I suggest home health workers that are working in people homes should not be eligible. I only take issue with the substantial number working via zoom.
Jeeze, I wonder why there
Jeeze, I wonder why there might be a vested interest in making sure your employees don't get sick and shunt the brunt of their (zoom) work on their colleagues. I mean, lol, not like the entire medical industry hasn't been working at 110% for nearly a year or anything. Fuck it, if Physical Therapy Phil gets sick from some asshole at the grocery store, there's tons of other medical professionals with fuckall to do, sitting around ready to cover for him.
All the doctors in this state are exhausted and overworked. As a result, a lot of their other, normal workload is shifting downhill. Just because you won't catch COVID from your workplace doesn't mean your work doesn't have an invested interest in keeping you running.
Additionally, hospital systems already have logistics and procedures set up for inoculating their staff (every year for flu). If it's a difference between super efficiently making sure all your employees can no longer contribute to the pandemic by using existing infrastructure, ORRRR dick around for another month figuring out how to get a recordkeeping/scheduling/follow up system for people who aren't affiliated with you but are "high priority", I say good for the hospitals for doing the former. Perfect can't be the opposite of good here.
Just what do you think a "home health worker" is?
You're inventing/appropriating a term to mean "people who work for healthcare companies in non-patient facing roles and who are currently working from home". A "home health worker" is someone who provides healthcare services to patients in the patients' home.
A social worker, speech
A social worker, speech therapist etc that would normally work with young children in the home?
Yeah they are home healthcare workers by the state definition. Near zero of them are working in peoples homes at this time, they are working remote via zoom, all of them eligible to be vaccinated.
Be careful
You're going to do yourself an injury if you keep dragging the goalposts and reaching like that.
yup, i mentioned similar on this thread:
https://www.universalhub.com/comment/823529#comment-823529
complaints?
I made a "comment". For the rest of your retort, Well, OK then. I'm sure you're the hardest working and smartest of us all. We mere mortals who struggle with the state's website and try to manage our busy schedules while helping our neighbors are therefore humbled in your presence.
Aren't there a bunch of sites?
There are a lot of different sites and it's pretty uncoordinated. There's a bill in the legislature right now to centralize this rather than forcing people to ferret through a lot of different sites.
You don't have to be like this all the time. You do have other choices, and you choose this.
It wasn't that hard.
Maybe I am just smarter.
Yes, I can be someone else. I can also be the person who calls someone out for complaining that they are not being spoon fed and having their hand held because the big computer isn't easy.
The HFW system, you should try it sometime. It works.
If you think it’s easy to get an appointment
Why didn’t your elderly relative book it herself?
And what do you think that person would have done if she didn’t have a relative to make the appointment for her?
spoonfed is it now?
Laddie. You clearly have no idea of what you're talking about, but if you wish to strut around with the all superior attitude, yeah. you can be "that person".
It should be spoonfed and hand held
Again, the objective is EVERYONE and AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE.
That means EASY. That means NEARBY. That means CONVENIENT.
The objective is not "I got mine look at me! Wheee!"
Vaccinations are all about herd immunity. They are not a participation trophy.
All of those things are
All of those things are important. But at the moment when demand outstrips supply they are not as important as the supply problem. At the moment I would drive to Maine if it meant I could get an appointment nor am I alone in that perspective. .
Its like suggesting a microbrewery that sells 100% of what it can produce on site should worry about getting a major distributor. One thing at a time folks.
Sorry, this is unhelpful.
You are making the classic, simplistic error of assuming that solving one precludes solving the other, that one must be solved ahead of the other and that we cannot solve both at the same time. You are wrong. Solve both.
You sure aren't. So let's make the system work for all the able-bodied people with cars who have the ability to take time off work to drive to Maine.
This is a terrible attitude. We need public thinking to solve a public health problem, not grabby "I got mine ho ho" behavior.
Mane isn't any better
Ha. Good luck with that plan. My friend in Maine can't get vaccinations scheduled for herself or her husband, who is over 90 with COPD.
I got one too, I had to stalk
I got one too, I had to stalk my relative's local CVS sign up site at midnight for a couple nights before I could grab one at reset. That's not reasonable or possible for the average person. Don't mistake luck for skill or intelligence.
Maybe not.
Not just "smarter", John. "Insufferable", however, = "yes".
You must have gone into the system
at just the right time then. My elderly mother and I have both been trying every day for the last week to get her an appointment anywhere within 20 miles. There was nothing. I tried again this morning and still nothing. She tried again this afternoon and was able to get an appointment. The mass.gov system stinks and it's a crapshoot when or if anyone can get an appointment.
Meanwhile in Worcester county...
The seniors are driving 2+ hours to Foxboro or Springfield because the only providers aren't taking appointments for 75+. UMass is only vaccinating their own patients, you can't call for an appointment and they are going through medical records to determine who should get it first. The other provider is reserving their appointments for 75+ city and town employees for the 6 towns its covers.
I would rather CVS get it at this point.
Cluster
It is a mess. My partner is a pharmacist who has been at work in person since last March with 2 co workers being positive since New Years and at least 3 ‘scares’ - she just got her shot last week after trying multiple locations and sites to sign up. A few of her co workers are considered essential and are over 70 and have at least 1 cormorbidititg and just were able to got Gillette
Luckily with staying up late and bouncing between sites we got my parents aphorism are in their 80s appointments for next week.
It isn’t about spoon feeding it is about consistency and constantly shifting guidance because lack of central coordination from the last admin. As far as I am concerned, any Trump loving asshole can suck it and stay home till June and let their elected GOP tell them suck it because no stimulus and no shots.
Bottom line - much better prep could have been done but nothing was ore planed at any level and giving it to accountants who will be remote till June is stupid.
I called them, and...
I called the CVS central phone number a couple hours ago, navigated their phonebot tree to the Covid stuff, and eventually got a human on the line.
I told her that the CVS Covid web page has self-contradictory information (it's long, I read the whole thing including the popdowns). In one place it says just a few locations in Mass., in another place it says they'll vaccinate at all their retail locations.
I had a little trouble understanding her accent, I wasn't sure she was even in the U.S., but I listened carefully and spoke slowly -- I requested info about CVS vaccination locations in Boston, Mass. She started naming places I never heard of -- turned out she was talking about "Boston, New York", a little town I never heard of (and I'm from NY).
The conversation was a complete waste of time. She knew less than I do about CVS plans and locations, and (even after careful web and phone research) I know almost nothing.
It is indeed a clusterfuck. I blame Trump, I blame Baker (not sure how much), and mostly I blame America's chaotic non-system for healthcare delivery, which I believe is alone in the developed world.