Bloomberg has developed a vaccine tracker to show the nation’s progress in distributing our coronavirus shots. South Dakota enjoyed a brief moment on top, as we enjoyed the advantage of small population, an oligopoly health care system able to herd its staff through the vaccine mill, and a higher proportion of easily shot-accessible health care workers per population.
But now that South Dakota’s hospitals have poked all the easy apples, we’re hitting the problem of making the vaccine available to the wider population when no one spent the summer and fall compiling a vaccine-order database containing every South Dakotan with occupation, health conditions, location, and contact information that would have made it a whole lot easier to figure out where to send new incoming batches of vials and needles and volunteer shooters (or paid vaccinators, who could easily have been hired, trained, and compensated, just like the vaccine-Census-takers and database makers we didn’t deploy last year, with all those millions of coronavirus relief funds we gave out instead, slowly, to big hotel chains and other industry pals of the Governor, and no, I don’t digress), and other states are catching up.
We’re still near the top of the vaccination-rate heap, getting at least one shot to 9.2%of our population, but Alaska (13.6% of the population dosed at least once), West Virginia, New Mexico, Connecticut, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Indiana, and the District of Columbia have all gotten shots to larger percentages of their people. Alaska is also the two-dose champ, with 4.7% of its population fully loaded, followed by WV, ND, then SD.
Lest we crow too much about our rates, let’s keep in mind enormous number of vaccines that have to be delivered. South Dakota has put 116,000 coronavirus shots in arms, but eleven states have delivered a number of doses (California is the leader, having given 3.98 million shots) larger than the number of people in our entire state (and New Jersey is close to becoming the twelfth, at 877,000 yesterday). Federal entities have delivered 1.83 million doses; the Veterans Administration alone has administered 1.03 million.
And we all still need to speed things up: Bloomberg calculates that, to reach a Fauci level of 75% vaccination against coronavirus, we’d have to sustain the latest national vaccination rate of 1.34 million doses a day for eleven months. And the U.S. has the sixth-highest figure for doses delivered per 100 people in the world, behind only Israel, Seychelles, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and Bahrain. At current rates, the rest of the world may take seven years to get its shots.
South Dakota needs to revamp its vaccine process ensuring no vaccine is thrown out or “goes bad”.
Relatives in other states inform that by the end of the day some vaccine sites have to toss good vaccine because the anointed categories on their state-sanctioned lists are no-shows.
This leads to a free-for-all telephonic, email, texting from vaccine-seekers (not yet on the state category lists) to receive the vaccination. Here in “Jethro-land” where the state treats the health of cattle better than people — the state ought to open up the vaccine spigots after 4pm daily so those wanting (and believing in science) may receive the vaccine, while it’s still viable.
States over-relying on “lists” and “process” and “order” are the states furthest behind with vaccine administration. South Dakota’s “small population advantage” will soon disappear in the data in the absence of a more aggressive implementation.
Hey, wait until you give the free for all of Eventbrite to get your concert tickets, I mean your vaccinations. We wasted a few hours on that one. The county switched and at least now we’re on a list so its just waiting until they contact us….however our wonderful governor has started setting up Publix in several counties, not ours for another call in free for all. Republicans don’t believe in government so they do their best to see it doesn’t work. By the way, Publix donated 100,000 to the governor and cvs only gave 25,000 and Walgreens nothing. Isn’t it wonderful how money talks.