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Despite delivering more doses in the last week than previously and getting over the 25,000-shot barrier for first vaccinations, Prince George’s County still lags well behind any other county in Maryland as a percentage – though it’s rising fast. Using the county’s updated numbers (which are not yet included in the state website), first doses have been given to about 3 percent of residents – double last week’s ratio. Montgomery County is at ~4.66 percent of its somewhat larger population, with Talbot County having the largest percentage vaccinated (10.7) and Baltimore County the largest count of first vaccinations at just over 56,000 or 6.9 percent of the population.
Sample statistics show the percentage of population vaccinated and total first/second vaccinations. Counties with small populations, like Talbot, tend to have disproportionately higher percentages. Baltimore and Montgomery Counties and Baltimore City (32,398/5.5 percent) are more like Prince George’s in being urban. For the latest available state numbers see coronavirus.maryland.gov/#Vaccine – click on Vaccine Data.
Overbooking
Potential Greenbelt recipients, lacking any sense of security that they’ll get a slot through the county, are signing up at every outlet they can locate on the web. As a result, because these sites are not coordinated, resources may be wasted when the extra appointments individuals ultimately receive aren’t needed and result in effort spent on rescheduling or appointments gone to waste. This is also likely to lead to overbooking issues as sites preemptively add more appointments than they actually have so that they don’t have empty spaces – just like airlines – and then more show up than expected.
Purge Acceleration
Intervention with Prince George’s County by Mayor Colin Byrd accelerated the purging from the county’s vaccination appointments of non-residents, opening up significantly more slots for residents.
The addition of phase 1C on Monday, January 25, significantly increases the pool of eligible individuals. This phase includes ages 65 to 74 and additional front-line workers and is estimated to be about 90,000 strong in the county. A local commentator on the Greenbelt Facebook page describes it as “a lottery,” and another bewails that there are forms to fill out for every ticket.
Fate of Most in Need
Trolling for websites to sign up for is an option open only to those who can handle online activities; the vaccination system is passive on the part of the organizations, who don’t reach out to the public but wait for individuals to sign up. As a result, some individuals are signed up at several sites and the most vulnerable older people, who may lack the computer capability, at none.
Vaccination HMO Style
An interesting contrast is Kaiser Permanente’s Covid-19 operation. Kaiser is a health maintenance organization (HMO) and all its patients are automatically registered and proactively informed as they become eligible and appointments are available – there’s not the free-for-all evident in the overall approach. Recent experience with them shows, for example, that a drive-through Covid-19 test can be scheduled online the same day – with the results delivered automatically by email only eight hours later. An HMO more closely resembles the centralized health delivery systems found in almost all first-world and some second-world countries.
Sylvia Lewis (News Review board member and display ads coordinator) recently received her first shot at a local Kaiser facility, and said she was very impressed with the process. She had made an appointment for her husband, Robert, for Friday, January 22 at the Kaiser Largo location but in trying to make hers, she tangled unsuccessfully with the website. Immediately after she had made Robert’s appointment, she received a phone call from Kaiser (as Lewis remarks, “by a real person”) who made a Saturday appointment for Sylvia.
When Lewis took her husband on January 22, the whole procedure – registering, getting the shot and waiting 15 minutes to see if there was a reaction – took one hour. It wasn’t quite as smooth for her shot on Saturday because more people were waiting, so it took 30 minutes to get to registration and then a longer wait to get the shot and the mandatory 15-minute wait. Nonetheless, it was still only two hours altogether. She notes that her only reaction to the shot was a nice long nap.
Another News Review member is also a Kaiser patient whose call came Saturday, January 23. She is 78 and the Lewises are in their 80s, so Kaiser is apparently systematically working through its patient base from higher to lower ages and considering health status. Because Kaiser has all the medical records of its patients’ care and vulnerabilities and reaches out to its patients deliberately, there are no requirements that its members apply, register or fill out any forms. They just check in.
Future Gains
It is apparent that the pace of vaccinations will pick up as more outlets start dispensing. (In Seattle, Starbucks coffee shops are part of the network of vaccination centers.) Some major grocery chains and pharmacies are also scheduled to start dispensing vaccinations by the end of the month. Older and most vulnerable Greenbelters are perceptibly beginning to receive shots and the trend is slowly moving in the right direction.
Meanwhile, in Greenbelt let’s all mask up and stay out of harm’s way.
News Review readers are invited to contribute short accounts of their vaccination adventures, positive and negative (not all may be printed). Send them to editor@greenbeltnewsreview.com and, if including a photograph, make sure to attach and not embed it, state who took the photo and give names for who is pictured in it. The newspaper doesn’t need (or want!) to know personal health details.
