So regardless of who goes first for vaccines....have any of you looked into registering to be notified when and where you could get vaccinated once your turn comes? Around here, a few counties have created registration websites that allow you to sign up.

My county is the one that includes Chicago. The city has been doing its own thing and the rest of the county is managed by separate government entities. At this point, there is nothing I can do to get in line. But I'm going to keep checking. Seems like being proactive is a good thing. I want the damn vaccine.

How is this being handled in your area?

I don't even know.

I actually asked that question of my friend in TX who got vaccinated (though i'm course each state will make its own rules).

I was curious if he got it through a local hospital, a practitioner, or a county health dept.

My wife has already been notified by the local hospital that she can get vaccinated. Of course, that was right when we left town for almost a month. But I suspect she'll be able to get vaccinated when we return. Healthcare worker ...

Quick search of NYS websites is both unhelpful and discouraging.


THe 30 page report about vaccine distribution is remarkably devoid of useful content. It's amazing how many words one can use to say 'we don't know yet'


There is a prioritization task force but it looks like any other political task force. Really depressing. I mean, assuming the guy from the meat packers union, the chick from Capital Region Latinos, and the Reverend from the church in Buffalo aren't quietly hiding their epidemiology and statistics credentials.

Last night I was talking to a friend who is a PhD (not MD), but who sees patients in a university health care setting so she's treated like other health care providers. She is scheduled to get vaccinated on Sunday, and she was the one who suggested that it may be a good idea to be proactive on this.

COVID sidebar....she works in the department of ophthalmology, and she said they've seen an increase in endophthalmitis, an infection inside of the eye that is very serious. They're seeing it in patients who have had cataract surgery.

When they culture the bug in the eye, they're finding that the bacteria is often one that occurs naturally in the mouth. They think it's because the patients are masked during surgery (because COVID), and the gap at the top of the mask may be allowing bacteria to travel more directly towards the eye.

We also talked about the vascular destruction that the virus may be leaving behind in some people. She's been talking to virologists at her university, and they think we're going to see people years or decades down the road who end up needing kidney or other organ transplants because of the damage they sustained during a bout of COVID today.

It just keeps on giving....

My dad is getting vaccinated on Jan. 14 at his memory care facility in Denver.

The governor of Colorado has lowered the age for the vaccine order 1b to 70.
I am going to book a slot for a shot and drive home at the first opportunity.

Yikes about the cataract surgery infections! I guess it would be wise to tape the top of masks to the skin during the operation..

My neighbor was seeing a macular degeneration specialist down at Northwestern and she told me back in late spring that when she went for a regular office appointment (no surgery) they taped her mask to her face. Seemed a little over the top at the time, but now it appears they were simply ahead of the game...

I dug around and found some info for Illinois, specifically for Cook County. Not sure if Chicago proper has its own registration program.

For anyone who might live in the county there's a form you can fill out and submit to the county department of public health to get notification about vaccine availability:

https://redcap.dph.illinois.gov/surveys/?s=PP8PJNFHMW

I assume I am, and should be, in the last group. I have some things that could constitute pre-existing conditions, but they're under control, and I'm capable of doing social distancing and staying safe. So I'm not eager to push my way into the line, other people need it more and are at greater risk. I'll start thinking about it in the late spring.

It seems that Orange County has some sort of sign-up system. I can tell that because there are newspaper articles with complaining that it doesn't work very well. For some reason it uses Q-codes and a lot of people don't understand them.

I can't figure out how to access the list but that's OK. By the time my turn comes around the system should be better sorted.

AFAICT it's a sh!tstorm in my state (surprise!)

I still can't figure out whether college teachers are (or should be) included in the educational group or not. And I kind of go back and forth in my own thinking on the matter, i.e. whether it's appropriate for me to get the vaccine at the same time as K-12 educators.

My sister-in-law (who lives in IL btw) works in health care (she's a therapist but sees patients in the main hospital, as opposed to a small stand-alone clinic or something), and she got her first dose of the vaccine last week IIRC.

ETA I just looked around for my mother's county (also in IL, age 76) and I can't find anywhere that it looks like she can register.

No one could have predicted:

Coronavirus vaccine has arrived, but frustrated Americans are struggling to sign up

It's WaPo but I don't think they're paywalling Covid stories.

I heard Fauci on This Week this morning. He talked about the 1947 smallpox vaccination program in New York; I had never heard of it.

quote:

On January 3, 2021, in explaining the potential for the early phase of the national Covid-19 vaccination campaign in the U.S., Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, described his personal experience in the 1947 smallpox epidemic, "New York City in March and April of 1947 vaccinated 6,350,000 people; 5 million of which they did in two weeks. I was a six-year-old boy who was one of those who got vaccinated. So if New York City can do 5 million in two weeks, the United States could do a million a day. We can do it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...ty_smallpox_outbreak

I know that state and local health departments have been stressed beyond their limits. I still find it remarkable that with all our technology, we haven't found a way to systematically register people and administer the COVID vaccine....it's not like we don't already do the flu vaccine, and we certainly knew a COVID vaccine was coming eventually.....no surprises here....