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"A COVID-19 vaccination event in Denver was overrun Saturday when Jeffco Public Schools alerted 14,000 employees that 200 extra doses of vaccine were available to those who could get to the National Western Complex within an hour.
Hundreds of people rushed to the complex on Humboldt Street to try to get the vaccine around 5 p.m. Saturday. Traffic backed up at the exit and into Interstate 70. Drivers wouldn’t let others merge into the line. Some people leapt from their cars and ran the final stretch to the building. One man arrived in a bathrobe; he hadn’t stopped to put on a shirt.
“I saw one woman open her car door, and her husband was like, ‘Go, go go!’ and she just took off running,” said James MacIndoe, a teacher at Standley Lake High School.
MacIndoe got the alert just before 5 p.m. and was in the line of traffic at the National Western Complex by 5:28 p.m., he said. It was dark, and a digital road sign directed drivers to tune their car radios to an AM station that was broadcasting a scratchy, looped message about the vaccination process.
“It was very post-apocalyptic,” he said. “…Passenger doors are flying open, people are bailing out of cars and running into the building.”
The scramble came at the end of a 5,000-person, appointment-only vaccination event organized by SCL Health for people over the age of 70. The event was focused on vaccinating people of color and low-income seniors in the neighborhoods around the National Western Complex, SCL Health senior vice president Megan Mahnke said Sunday.
The supply of vaccine fluctuated all day — going up when people with appointments failed to show and going down when they arrived late or when walk-in patients were accepted, something organizers tried to accommodate as much as possible. But by the end of the day, it was clear there would be extra doses, Mahnke said, so organizers offered the limited extra supply to several community partners, including Jeffco Public Schools, to ensure the doses were not wasted.
“We told them they could do a targeted invite to some of their teachers, and they did a mass invitation to 5,000-plus teachers,” Mahnke said. “It was massive. We had hundreds of teachers show up … They just came from all over.”
The district sent the alert out to all 14,000 employees because district officials wanted to be fair and needed to act quickly, Tammy Schiff, chief communications officer, said Sunday.
“The quick decision was, what is the fairest, most equitable and fastest way we could get the message out so we could get even 200 people there,” Schiff said. The school district does not have a prioritized list of which employees should get the vaccine before others, she said, and there wasn’t time on Saturday night to parse that out. A Sunday afternoon statement from the district apologized for the rush and said officials there will create such a list for future “unexpected surplus vaccine opportunities.”
“In the heat of the moment — if the risk was wasting vaccines if not enough people had been there, that’s a bigger problem than, ‘Oh, we had a lot of people and we had to turn some people away,’” she said.
Between 30 minutes and an hour after the first notification, the district sent another, telling anyone who was not already in the building to go home. Schiff said she believes as many as 500 district employees received the vaccine after the first alert, even though the initial estimate of extra doses was 200. Mahnke could not say how many extra does were administered, because the supply fluctuated so frequently. All 5,000 doses were given to patients, she said.
“We had to get to the point where we were like, ‘The event is closed,’” Mahnke said. “They were trying to bump folks who already had appointments. We didn’t walk out of there until 10:30 last night. We tried to accommodate as many as we could. With all our other partners, they got it. This was just a misstep.”
Teachers, child care providers and Colorado residents ages 65 to 69 are allowed to begin receiving coronavirus vaccinations on Monday as the state expands from vaccinating just health care workers, first responders, residents of long-term care facilities and those over the age of 70. Extra doses, however, can always be given to anyone to keep them from being wasted.
When teacher Jessica Post got the first alert Saturday, she almost didn’t go — she didn’t want to take the vaccine from someone who needed it more. But she lived 10 minutes from the vaccination site, so she figured she’d at least try.
In the traffic outside, she too saw people running into the building, others refusing to let cars merge in front of them.
“It was like Black Friday or something,” she said. “Everyone was out for themselves.”
She and MacIndoe both made it inside and received the vaccine. The center was out of clipboards and short on pens, so those waiting filled out medical forms by scribbling on whatever they could and passed pens around, MacIndoe said. The chaos calmed as the crowd was funneled into established lines and waiting areas.
When the medical providers rolled a cart of vaccines into her area, Post and those around her were jubilant. After receiving her shot, Post waited for the required 15-minute observation period before leaving. The woman next to her bawled the whole time.
“She was calling everyone she knew, and people were taking pictures, and there was this energy of people being ecstatic and relieved and happy, just on cloud nine,” Post said.
Post felt like she’d won the lottery. She felt overwhelmingly relieved, and a little bit guilty.
“There’s just been a feeling, and it’s been like this the whole pandemic at a systemic level, a feeling of uncertainty,” she said. “Our district has gone back and forth on decisions, and the protocols change constantly. I’m also a coach, and every day there is some new thing we can do or we can’t do. So it just feels like when something like this comes up, you have to take advantage of it, instead of being patient and waiting your turn.”
Jeffco Public Schools went back to in-person and hybrid learning a couple of weeks ago, MacIndoe said, which raised teachers’ anxiety. He’s grateful he was able to receive the first dose of the vaccine Saturday, and relieved to have a set appointment for the second dose.
“Everybody is really desperate for these vaccines,” he said. “We’ve been back in classrooms for two weeks. And it feels very unsafe to be in a classroom full of kids without the vaccine.”
I've been checking the Safeway, Walgreens and King Soopers websites daily for the past two weeks for a 1st vaccination appointment...and landed a big fat "no appointments available" bust from all three. Something is not right here.
It scans CVS, walgreens, walmart and safeway location for available vaccine appointments. Author says it's a prototype, but wanted to make it available.
I've been checking the Safeway, Walgreens and King Soopers websites daily for the past two weeks for a 1st vaccination appointment...and landed a big fat "no appointments available" bust from all three. Something is not right here.
I think most people in my area are finding their appointments through medical centers - in Colorado Springs, this means Kaiser, UCHealth, PeakVista, etc. You have to go to their websites or call them and get on their waiting lists. It is not abnormal for it to take multiple weeks. A lot of teachers being vaccinated right now are getting their appointments directly through their work connections- for example, in my district, our contact information was given to several providers and the providers reached out to us through our work e-mail in a priority vaccination campaign for teachers. We received invitations for appointments through this special queue. Some are still waiting but most have now gotten their first shot scheduled at this point.
It scans CVS, walgreens, walmart and safeway location for available vaccine appointments. Author says it's a prototype, but wanted to make it available.
Colorado lost one of its best people on 31 Jan 2021 when Dennis Mileti died of COVID-19, two days before he was due to be vaccinated.
Mileti was one of the world’s leading experts on how humans behave in disasters. He was head of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder where he helped to develop disaster communication guidance that governments could use to advise the public.
In March of 2020 he was terrified of what he saw, not the disease itself, but the mixed messages coming from various Federal personalities which confused the public and meant that people would cherry pick whatever info they wanted as far as how to deal with the threat of the virus. It meant “That gives the public the ability to pick the answer they like, which is the No. 1 no-no in public messaging.” Many millions chose to ignore the warnings and not wear a mask or do social distancing . . . and we see now how that worked out.
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"COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — The mayor of Woodland Park, a city northwest of Colorado Springs, has died weeks after being diagnosed with COVID-19, officials said.
Woodland Park Mayor Pro Tem Hilary LaBarre said on Tuesday that Val Carr, who was less than a year into his mayoral term, had been battling the virus for about two months, The Gazette reported. He was 71.
LaBarre said he had been hospitalized in Colorado Springs.
Carr, who was a fixture in the Woodland Park community for more than 20 years, was elected mayor in April. He served on the city council for four years before winning the election. . . . "
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"Gov. Jared Polis on Friday promised that every adult in Colorado will become eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine by mid-April as the state prepares to enter the next phase of its vaccination campaign next week.
Notably, the governor said he anticipates every Coloradan 16 and older who wants to be inoculated against the novel coronavirus will receive at least their first dose by the end of May.
“We are in for a more or less normal summer,” Polis said during a news briefing. “It will be a lot more normal than last summer. Folks will be confident in their protection.”
The governor’s announcement comes a day after President Joe Biden directed states to make all adults eligible for COVID-19 vaccinations by May 1. It’s also earlier than the original summer timeframe state officials gave for when vaccines would be made available to the general public. Last month, Polis said he expected vaccinations to be open to all adults by late April or early May.
“This is a race to vaccinate the majority of our population in our state and our nation,” Polis said. “In many ways, it’s one of the greatest undertakings in recent history. It’s like our 21st-century moonshot with only a matter of weeks and months to get there.”
Researchers are still conducting clinical trials on available COVID-19 vaccines to see how well they do in children, which is why people under 16 are not included in the governor’s timeline.
The governor’s optimism comes a year after the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic. As of Thursday, 694,597 people in Colorado are fully inoculated against the novel coronavirus.
The state health department reported 874 new cases of COVID-19 and 303 hospitalizations for the disease. So far, more than 6,000 people have died from the novel coronavirus in Colorado.
Earlier this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines on what people can do once they receive full protection from a vaccine. A person is considered fully vaccinated two weeks after their second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna shots, or two weeks after Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine.
Once people are fully vaccinated they can gather with others who also are protected without masks indoors. They can also gather indoors with unvaccinated people from one other household without masks, according to the CDC.
People 60 to 64 and those with two or more chronic health conditions have been eligible to get their COVID-19 vaccines since March 5. Before them, the state was heavily focused on immunizing people 70 and older, teachers, medical professionals and people living in nursing homes.
Colorado will make COVID-19 vaccines available to an additional 2.5 million people late next week when the state moves to Phase 1B.4 of its vaccination rollout, Colorado National Guard Brigadier Gen. Scott Sherman said.
The number of people in this group is likely “double-counted” as people might qualify both because of their age and profession, state officials said.
The next phase — which starts March 19 — includes people ages 50 to 59 and various types of essential workers, including restaurant employees, postal workers, faith leaders, manufacturing employees and frontline journalists.
“This is designed to provide vaccine to those that must do their work in person, who may be working indoors in places where ventilation is not at the highest quality so they are at highest risk because of the work that they do and where they do it,” said Scott Bookman, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s COVID-19 incident commander.
It also includes people with at least one chronic health condition that puts them at high risk for severe COVID-19 and student-facing higher education faculty and staff.
Essential workers should contact their employers to get a COVID-19 vaccine rather than going directly to a health care provider. But people 50 and older or with high-risk conditions should get the shot from a vaccine provider, Bookman said."
The odd thing is I know several people in the 60+ category who have been unable to obtain appointments for the vaccine (myself not included).
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