It’s a public university, so pretty sure as of now they aren’t deviating. This just happens to be a state where there is an over supply of the vaccine and under supply of willing participants. Many medical workers haven’t wanted it so they are moving onto the next groups. There was a larger anti vaxxer campaign before in this state and it’s even bigger now. It shocks me, but if people’s ignorance is going to be the reason why my daughter may be able to get the vaccine earlier there, then that thrills me. The state and university has not done a great job with covid as a whole. Somehow she has dodged it thus far, but with her returning to school in about a week, I don’t trust anyone and really fear people will be bringing it back because they don’t require any negative tests or anything. She will go get one pretty frequently but others don’t and contact tracing is essentially up to the students who test positive and then they have to go report it back, so basically non-existent.
Except testing and food distribution is nearly all local – not federal plan required. The slow vaccine rollout is primarily on the state governors and the rules that their Health Departments enacted. Fortunately, the’ve seen the error of their ways and are now letting common sense prevail. To wit, CA announced yesterday that a tier such as 1a doesn’t have to be complete before moving on to 1b…
btw: just last week Fauci did not appear in favor of releasing all vaccines instead of holding the second dose back.
Yes, not having a federal plan is a big part of the problem as well as the feds not giving enough money and resources to the states to get the job done. Fauci is still on the fence about releasing the vaccines as it’s risky. I think the plan is still to hold some back, but not as much as they’re holding back. It’s a risky proposition if they can’t get the number they need produced with the DPA but it may be what is required under the circumstances because if something drastic isn’t done soon, our hospital systems are going to collapse. A few days ago we were at 3k deaths a day, now we’re over 4k deaths a day. How many days until we’re at 5k a day? Then more? That’s just unfathomable to me. There are about 400 kids in my son’s high school class. To think that yesterday the number of people died were basically the equivalent of more than 10 of the size of my son’s class and almost 3x the size of our high school blows me away! It’s scary.
I have wondered if vaccinating college students who live in congregant settings and other people like that not in college would actually be the best people to prioritize for vaccinating because they’re the silent spreaders in many (not all) cases. They’re mainly asymptomatic and so many of them never know they ever had it. The number of my kids friends that have antibodies but never knew they had it and tested negative at times they were exposed is baffling. Their exposures of course were to people who had symptoms or were only tested because of someone somewhere along the line that had symptoms.
Another thought is even if more should go to California and other states in more serious trouble at this point so to bring down the hospital rates and spread because they need it the most or way more people will die. I keep waiting for the day they’re just going to say we’re taking everyone off of a ventilator. They’re pretty close as I know I read that they’re starting to remove people off vents if they have a low survival rate. That’s just awful.
CDC needs to put out some guidance for those states that have or need to move ahead also. Stopping at just 1b is ridiculous. I saw that list from CA and that’s good.
I don’t think you understand the situation in Austin, at all. Texas moved to 1b on December 28th, so if any UT students are in 1b, of course they will get shots. I have seen no data supporting your anecdotes of large numbers of people choosing not to vaccinate ( and if you wish to compare anecdotes, my sister in NJ reports that most of the med assistants in the largest private practice there haven’t bothered getting the shot).
In every state, there appears to be vaccine hesitancy among communities of color, which leaders are trying to address.
If state leaders need additional guidance, they can call the governors of Connecticut or the Dakota’s. They seem to be effective at roll out. Obviously more supply will help, but the holdup right now seems to be in implementing the shots already distributed.
Surveys indicate that this higher COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is specific to Black people, commonly attributed to distrust of medicine due to various historical events and current false beliefs about Black people among physicians. In contrast, Asian people tend to be more enthusiastic about getting the vaccine, while Latino people tend to be similar to the overall average in willingness to get the vaccine.
However, there may also be access issues among lower SES people (more commonly people of color) who may be less connected to the health care system in general (e.g. no medical office notifying them that “COVID-19 vaccine is available for you!”). In addition, older age prioritization means that Latino and Asian people are less represented in those priority groups.
Your numbers are tiny compared to a place like California (and yes, I adjusted for pop size). Based on yesterdays new cases, California had twice the new infections on a per capita basis.
I would rather see them target the cities that are having the highest new infections, but luckily for Maine, the folks that decide disagree with me 
By the way, I am not in California but in a small town in the South…but I would like to see us get Covid under control asap so we could get back to our lives and I do not think trying to appease everyone is the way to do it.
Unfortunately it’s hard to blame African Americans for their hesitancy after what the US did to them with the Tuskegee experiments. But, this is why vaccine education is vital. But it’s not just POC. It is also religious groups that don’t want it and other large anti vaxxer’s in some states and like you said ones of lower SES. I believe homeless shelters will be giving vaccines though because of the congregant living situations and hopefully they will have success.
Not too far down the line, this vaccine is going to be mandatory at certain places of employment, or to work at a hospital, go to a sporting event, fly on an airplane, go to a college, etc. For now, hospitals are not quite ready to mandate it because they can’t afford to lose staff but it is what’s coming. Millions have been administered and no one has died, thank god. Eventually someone might, but when you look at the millions who have had the vaccine the chances of anyone dying from it diminishes.
@roycroftmom I do understand the situation in Austin and Texas as a whole and I’m fully aware of Texas moving to 1b. Texas as a whole has done a lousy job with Covid, and that includes Austin and UT. Their numbers on the portal are not even accurate. If a student takes a test at an off campus facility and is positive, it doesn’t get recorded in the UT dashboard. Hundreds of kids get tested in their hometowns or in Austin area locations because they can get rapid tests at all hours of the day and quicker. It is a complete cluster. I know numerous people young and old who have already received the vaccine whether they work in the hospital or not. If my daughter had a BMI of 30 she could get it, even if her BMI were 25 there’s a secondary list where she could go on and get it. Most states are not vaccinating anyone under 65 at this time. They have the supply there because they don’t have the demand, of I forgot, except for the abusers who run and go to ARC because people go and tell them there are extra vaccines there so a bunch of families ran to go get shots who have no underlying health conditions and would have otherwise been in the very last group, thereby taking the vaccine does away from people who otherwise could have gotten it. While that’s not UT, that’s clearly a problem with how it’s being administered in the state.
I live in Orange County California. Our population is about 3 million people and we are averaging about 3,000 new cases a day. The ICU’s are at zero capacity and mortuaries don’t have room to store the bodies.
I prefer fact-based data over your personal anecdotes. On a per capita basis, Texas is 38th in overall COVID cases and 29th in COVID deaths, so it is doing better than most US states in both.
California, and specifically Marin County, has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country.
I remember OC was initially resistant to some restrictions and had some turnover there with the health dept if I recall. Have things gotten better in that regard with people taking it seriously and wearing masks, or has it remained an issue.
3,000 cases is crazy. I just looked up Cook County (where Chicago is) with a much larger population that OC and their 7 day avg is 2836/day vs 3658/day for OC over the same 7 days.
3m (OC) vs 5m (Cook) population. Those numbers are insane and I’m sorry you’re going through that. I hope there is soon an end in sight. Hopefully when we can all just walk in and get a vaccine without chomping at the bit to get one will be that day!
I believe public health experts are unanimous in saying that the priority is getting the shot out quickly, even if some skip the line improperly, rather than verifying perfect compliance with priority groups. A BMI of over 30 qualifies as an underlying condition.
State leaders are very aware of the risk/benefit tradeoffs-which is why many vaccine sites do not request any form of identification. There are millions of undocumented people at high risk who are very wary of being put into government database. Better to give shots to all who present themselves.
If no identification is required, then how can someone be part of the CDC database? And how would it work so that only “some skip the line improperly”?
Why have any priority groups at all then? This makes no sense.
California health authorities are admitting that the over regulation of who is next in line is leading to a slow down in getting people vaccinated. The state has had months to get things set up for this. I don’t know what the hold up is. It seems to me that those who feel most at risk will also be the ones most motivated to sign up to get the vaccines. Just open the line to everyone over 65 (show ID) and be done with it.
Certain categories are simply too nebulous for those doing the vaccinating to determine if that person is supposed to be in the tier getting the vaccinations. For example, is a ‘home health care worker’ someone who is taking care of the elderly mother at home but not getting paid and not an employee of any recognized agency?
Ok, I understand now. They seem to be just trying to get the shots into arms, which makes sense. The ignorance is really something else, isn’t it?
Although I’d heard that my state was going to move as a state into the next priority group (1B), there was an announcement made recently that some districts were moving into 1B this coming Monday. I’m wondering if they are moving ahead the rest of the state because they efficiently got through 1A, or because they are so slow about it that the state wants the shots to get arms, so is allowing the next priority group to be vaccinated in those districts.
Allocating vaccine to states on a basis other than in ratios based on state populations is likely to lead to a lot of political arguments, which will only increase political divisions and possibly cause delays if the arguments go on for a while. Also, changing conditions can result in less predictability (e.g. if a new hotspot of infections pops up somewhere, do vaccines previously promised elsewhere get reallocated to the hotspot? If so, expect more complaining from the places that got fewer than promised.).
That is probably the same reason why some risk factors are not accounted for in priority lists. It is known that men and minorities are at higher risk of dying from COVID-19 even after accounting for things like age and pre-existing conditions, but no vaccine prioritization plan moves people up or down on the basis of gender or race/ethnicity, which would result in some very ugly political reactions.
Do you mean in general, or for COVID-19? While Marin County is generally known as an anti-vaxxer hotspot, the state of California is far from the lowest in vaccination rates. For example,
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/imz-managers/coverage/schoolvaxview/data-reports/coverage-trend/index.html
shows kindergarten MMR vaccination rates, with California at one of the higher rates. Colorado, Idaho, Alabama, Kansas, and Washington have the lowest rates. Mississippi, West Virginia, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Maryland have the highest rates.
It was a big controversy with the “skipping the line” in this particular case. The hospital didn’t even make an effort to call people on the waitlist. So, a family with a university professor, an attorney and a student, were able to get vaccinated because they were called by another university professor who heard about it via word of mouth and this particular family put it all over social media saying they didn’t feel guilty about it at all. Pretty sad when there are protocols in place and there are a lot of people ahead of them that want it and should’ve gotten it. They aren’t the only randoms that got it either. The hospital of course apologized and admitted the error. It’s understandable that they don’t want to have to throw out doses but this wasn’t a case where they had a few extra doses nor was this like the case of the 2 guys who happened to be walking in a grocery store and were called over by a pharmacist who had 2 doses that were going to be trashed if not used within the next 10 mins.
I don’t know about the CDC database but people are receiving the medical cards with the dosages, type of vaccine, date etc, so maybe it’s not a name that’s going in but and ID number? The worry though should be to make sure people aren’t giving their card then to someone else and “splitting” the vaccine and never coming back for the second one. But again, that’s why it’s so important to make sure people get it and follow up and come back for that second shot.
They can’t just open it up to everyone over 65 or they’ll have the same mess as they do with Florida. A more graduated opening might be better though, like everyone over the age of 90 come now, everyone over 80, then 70 and so on. But if they just do a hail Mary to all over 65, it will be a free for all and a mess. Not to mention the people who will come from other states to try to get it, which is what is happening in Florida.
Home health care worker to me is completely different than someone working at a long term facility. I don’t view a caregiver in a personal home as someone considered the same risk as they’re not dealing with volume of patients/people or with the same high risk associated with people working in congregant settings, but I understand the problem with the categories being too broad. Same thing will happen when they get to education. Is a home schooled parent considered an educator? A person who coaches but is otherwise not involved in a school at all? Part time vs full time? I think I read that Ohio is doing schools as all school employees and not putting one higher than another which is fine, but doesn’t solve the issue for those who don’t work in a typical school setting.
Bottom line, they need to speed it up and get the ball rolling. I see it looks like we’re around 6m in the US now so maybe we’ve sped it up a little.
About putting college students higher up the line because they live in dorms and move around a lot, thus potentially being super spreaders…at my D’s college the number of people getting Covid are very much Substantially lower than the numbers in the general community. And I think the same is true in many, many other colleges where they take Covid seriously and enforce mask wearing and social distancing.
Back over the summer I had been extremely concerned about college kids traveling all over the country to go back to school and bringing Covid with them. I’ve been so impressed with the kids, and how they have been careful during their travels (masks, face shields on planes, etc), and how they have complied with the 2 week isolation period upon arrival and 2x weekly testing thereafter. These kids really deserve a lot of kudos because they have given up a lot of their social lives to protect US, not them, since percentage wise they are so low risk.
Since these kids have been so compliant, I think it gives us a chance to vaccinate those that will die or tie up hospital beds first, so we can keep those limited resources available for others - the heart attack victim, car accident victims, and the surprise bad response Covid victims from groups that normally don’t have a bad response.
I think the level of responsibility of these college kids should be applauded. I know I greatly appreciate it.
Ignorance is an understatement. I don’t get it. My daughter had a dental appointment yesterday and I know they have all had the opportunity to be vaccinated. She then tells me the hygenist that cleaned her teeth chose not to get it yet. That she thinks it’s “too early”. What??!! Who would pass that up? Said she would eventually get it, but not now.
My state, IL finally announced who is first as part of 1b and that includes people over 65. They will center on getting that age group done first. They say when they are substantially through group 1a. My MIL in and independent facility and my ex husband Dr still hasn’t gotten shots so who knows where they are with 1a. I know OT’s and PT’s and plenty of dental people who have received them so hopefully they’re making progress. Group 1b though has over 3m people in it and we’ve only received 344k doses as it is now for 1a. I’m in 1b but if I’m with 3m people, who knows how long it will take. My priority now really is to get my parents vaccinated as soon as possible in that group. They live together in their own home so won’t be able to get it through 1a and have to wait for 1b. I will feel much better once I know they’ve been vaccinated and then my kids.