Rush for COVID shots awaited next week
More providers offer vaccine as eligibility expands
Pete Mora, 57, spent a week calling and looking for appointments online before getting his first vaccine Wednesday at Wellmed’s Elvira Cisneros Senior Community Center on the South Side.
“We went through seven different avenues to get scheduled,” said Mora, who has lived in San Antonio for more than 30 years. “The hard part is getting scheduled for the whole thing.”
Josefa Cruz, 48, had to call Wellmed’s hotline for a week to secure an appointment for herself and her two daughters. She took a celebratory selfie with a volunteer who was sanitizing the seats and expressed relief that they managed to get in before the expected rush.
That rush begins Monday, when all Texas adults become eligible for the shots. The appointments will remain hard to get — but there are more ways to get them, officials said.
San Antonio’s four government-run mass vaccination sites haven’t been notified of any increase in supply, but the vaccine has become available at private doctors’ offices and retail drugstore chains, and the number of providers will continue to increase.
“What I don’t think people fully un
derstand is that there are dozens and dozens of providers who received the COVID-19 vaccine throughout Bexar County,” Assistant City Manager Colleen Bridger said earlier this week.
That means younger, healthier Texans might have to shop around, call more places and surf more websites if they want to get vaccinated once they become eligible Monday.
The vaccine stock throughout the community also is increasing: 65,000 doses were delivered to various locations last week alone, and “that 65,000 is growing every week,” said Bridger, who oversees the Metropolitan Health District.
City- and county-operated mass vaccination sites — such as Metro Health’s operation at the Alamodome and University Health’s vaccine clinic at the Wonderland of the Americas mall — get their vaccines from the state. Other places, such as pharmacies, get theirs from federal sources.
And the federal pipeline been widening.
“Our community’s supply is increasing,” said Dr. Junda Woo, Metro Health’s medical director. “There’s more (vaccines) coming through the federal program ... to places like CVS and H-E-B and some of the Walgreens, to independent pharmacies.”
The state’s new rules allow seniors 80 and older to walk in to vaccination sites and get their shots immediately. As San Antonio’s mass vaccination sites prepare for increased demand, some are trying to give that priority access through their appointment process.
University Health launched a special online registration process for them Thursday. They can visit universityhealthsystem.com and click on the yellow banner at the top of the page to reach an online form, where they will have to give their date of birth. The system will then call them to schedule an appointment. has
Those seniors must be prepared to show their photo identification with their birthdate when they show up to get the shot.
“As the line gets longer, we’re looking for ways to make sure they stay at the front of it,” University Health spokeswoman Elizabeth Allen said of the oldest seniors. “They don’t have to compete for those times when we open up a bunch of slots.”
The city’s vaccine operation at the Alamodome will allow seniors 80 and up to walk in without appointments starting next week, Woo said. They are urged to come in the afternoons, when the pace is less hectic.
Walk-in access won’t be granted to anyone younger than 80, though.
Because the local governmentrun sites are still receiving the same number of vaccine doses and will continue to tightly control access, they aren’t bracing for people
of all ages to crash their gates. Metro Health is still limited to 10,000 doses per week for its Alamodome operation, while Wellmed still gets 18,000 doses per week to dispense at two of its community centers.
Vaccine appointments scheduled for next week at the Alamodome were booked weeks ago, Woo said.
And the latest batch of Alamodome appointments, which were to become available at 7 p.m. Thursday, are still limited to people 50 and older or to anyone at least 16 years old with an underlying health condition. Those appointments will extend through May 1.
The city’s community health workers also will continue canvassing vulnerable neighborhoods to schedule vaccine appointments for people 50 years old and up.
“The amount of vaccine that we get is not increasing,” Bridger said of Metro Health’s supply. “So it
doesn’t make any sense to open another mass vaccination site.
“The federal government is increasing its weekly shipments to private providers throughout the county. That’s how a number of people are going to have access to the vaccine — through their private provider or their pharmacy.”
People without appointments sometimes gather in the evenings outside University Health’s vaccine clinic, which spans two floors in the Wonderland of the Americas mall, to see if they can get vaccinated with any leftover doses at closing time.
“That does happen,” Allen said. “We don’t encourage it because if there are doses left over, there are only a tiny handful. And we hate to see large numbers of people out there (interacting) unvaccinated and then the majority be disappointed.
“Just showing up is not a good idea. Because we are serving teachers, school district employees and child care workers for the next couple of weeks, we don’t have a date yet for when we’re going to release a large number of appointments. People should just keep monitoring the (University Health) website and the (Go Mobile) app and the other ways they can get notifications.”
Wellmed, which books vaccine appointments only by phone at 833-968-1745, is expecting a lot more calls next week, when every adult will be eligible.
“It’s one thing to just say, ‘Oh, everybody’s eligible!’” said Dr. Laura Huete, a Wellmed senior medical director and physician. “Ideally, you would have your supply outpace your demand. And right now, we’re seeing the opposite. … It is a little bit of a waiting game.”
Adding to the challenges is a rising percentage of patients not showing up for their vaccine appointments.
Two weeks ago, the “no show” rate at all mass vaccination sites across the city stood at 5 percent. Then it began to climb. On a single day last week, that number surged to 20 percent, Bridger said.
She speculated the broken appointments may have resulted from spring break, people forgetting their reservations or patients unexpectedly getting vaccinated somewhere else.
“If you are fortunate enough to get a COVID-19 vaccine appointment, please keep that appointment,” Bridger said. “Because it’s only exacerbating the unavailability for other people.”
People with a vaccine appointment at the Alamodome who no longer need it can cancel it by calling 311, Woo said.
Mark Olmos, 50, who suffers from asthma, got his vaccine Wednesday at the Cisneros Center so he can attend his daughter’s wedding. His mother surprised him with the appointment — she booked it for him after waiting on the phone for 90 minutes.
By comparison, the shot was speedy.
“It’s so quick,” he said of his trek through the center.
Thuy Nguyn, 42, said she and her parents snagged their appointments after a long wait on the phone.
“It’s the right time,” Nguyn said. “We held off until more people got it, and we saw good results.” itself