Vaccination Clinics
I got my second shot today (wooohoo!) at the Convention Centre, escorted by my beloved spouse. This is what I observed:
- There were about three greeters at the door to the outside of Canada Place. One asked me if anyone in my bubble had been sick, but I think that was the only question I got asked.
- There were a pair of stations that asked us to take off our masks and take their procedure mask, then sanitize our hands. I was wearing an N95 particulate (i.e. with a vent) underneath a procedure mask, but they made me take that off as well. That was odd, but whatever.
- The person at the sanitization station then pointed us at a woman waving a sign that said something like “COME HERE NEXT” at the entrance to a rope maze (the kind that snakes around to turn a 2d line into a 3d area). There were probably 20-30 people in the maze ahead of us. I think we stopped moving once or twice very briefly, but basically walked continuously.
- In the next area, I could see about forty stations on the left, A1 to D5. On the right, there were tables with 20 yellow bins which I presume were bins for discarding needles. I saw one sign that said “Pfizer”, so I assume those tables were also where they filled syringes.
- A man at the end of the rope maze directed me to a nearby table (A1, as it turned out).
- This table was for verifying information. A woman at that table scanned the printed barcode which I had brought with me and filled out the second-dose date on a vaccination card. I asked if she could also fill in when I’d gotten my first dose, and she said she could not, that she didn’t have that information. I was surprised but pleased to see that very little of my personal information was available to her.
- Someone came over and told me to go over to the woman waving the sign saying “4”.
- At the indicated table, there was a very friendly vaccinator. He said that he retired from being a family doctor in 2007 to go run a nursing home, then he retired from that in 2020. He unretired to help out with vaccinating. We thanked him for his service.
- He confirmed my information against what his laptop was showing him, and then he gave me a shot. “Think of something pleasant!” he told me before pricking my deltoid.
- The vaccinator then filled out the type (Pfizer) the lot, and the location (CC) plus his initials (HR), explaining as he went. I was glad that he explained, otherwise I would have wondered why he was carbon-copying Human Resources!
- He also said that he couldn’t fill out my vax card with the first dose information because he didn’t have information about when I had gotten my first shot either. Yay for data privacy!
- I asked him how many vaccination stations there were, and he said about 40. He said that the convention centre was supposed to get 4000 doses per day, but that it varied a lot. I think he said that the most he’d seen was 5000 in one day. He said it was kind of light when we were there.
- I asked him which day of the week was busiest and he said it varied wildly.
- We then got pointed at the waiting area, where a very friendly man pointed us to some seats. We asked him if it was a fun job. He said that he normally worked shepherding tourists onto cruise liners, so in his regular job, he was used to dealing with happy people. “Everybody’s happy to be going on a cruise!” He said that VCH hired the cruise liner loading crew en masse “because we’re people movers, that’s what we do!” We agreed that it was an inspired choice.
- I asked if he could tell if we were skewing so heavily to second doses because public health got scared about Delta or because there just wasn’t demand for first doses any more. He didn’t have a good answer.
- We waited our 15 minutes, and then left. Thank you, Convention Centre! Thank you, VCH! Thank you, BC taxpayers!
Statistics
Today: +109 cases, +1 death, +8,917 first doses, +55,363 second doses.
Currently 128 in hospital / 48 in ICU, 1,389 active cases, 143,748 recovered.
| First doses | Second doses | |
| adults | 76.7% | 18.2% |
| over-12s | 75.1% | 17.8% |
| everybody | 68.1% | 16.1% |
We have 317,109 doses in fridges; we’ll use it up in 5.5 days at last week’s rate. We’ve given more doses than we’d received by 4 days ago.
We have 225,088 mRNA doses in fridges; we’ll use it up in 3.9 days at last week’s rate. We’ve given more mRNA doses than we’d received by 4 days ago.
We have 92,021 AZ doses in fridges; we’ll use it in 16.8 days at last week’s rate.
Charts
From Blake Shaffer:
From Justin McElroy’s tweetstream:
Note that different people have different figures for percent vaccinated because everybody uses a different denominator and nobody every says which one they have chosen grumble grumble grumble…