Instead, we Americans debated mask efficiency under the guise of liberty. The Administration made Covid the worse kept secret. Americans were asked to report to emergency rooms for diagnosis when rapid testing did not exist. The sick were brought into the ward and ICU infecting main hospital staff. Contact tracing was never sourced the necessary expertise, technology or enforcement to protect much of anything.
To control the pandemic now that there is a vaccine, the system has to make the process convenient— full stop. There should be universal covid vaccine access. Vaccination buses should pull up to where individuals most naturally congregate — Adults at home and at work; children in school. Registration within a universal electronic public database should take at most a minute. Patrons should be handed a cookie with application of bandaid and a high five when exiting the door.
Instead, getting vaccinated is hard as ever. Who is eligible and whether the vaccine is available is unclear. The country is sticking with a vaccinate in heath care facility strategy. Methods of registration feel like a lengthy standardised test. The system is promulgating yet another non-sensical health standard: A minimum 15 minute waiting period following injection. Just the math and logistics of this alone adds years to our herd immunity goal.
I chanced upon my own Covid vaccine opportunity through an email I rarely check. I was surprised the vaccine was being offered to me but signed up after 10 minutes on an on-line scheduling system. At the appointment in the hospital where I work, I was asked the same covid, risk and eligibility questions as during the sign-up. My injection was delayed 15 minutes because there weren’t enough chairs to handle the subsequent observation period. My nurse was awesome but I hoped so too would be the vaccine injected in my arm. As a rule, hope should never be uttered alongside descriptions of health policy.
Am I glad to have gotten the vaccine? Sure, but I realise the great many problems: It was arranged within a complex information system I happen to navigate daily, administered in the facility where I work, on a day I as the boss could arrange the 45 minutes of time. I felt both grateful and ashamed. The grateful part is obvious. But as someone who cares for children, I am actually at minimal risk. My shot would have been better allocated to any octogenarian, adult with obesity or diabetes, or household with medium income less than 45K. But this is not the story the system or doctors getting immunised on Facebook tell. And thus we return to the root cause problem in our All-American Covid response.