Fla. vaccine distribution keeping me on hold

Lucky me, to be an ancient. Not only old, but with the bonus of an underlying medical complication. Hurray. Old age is finally good for something other than the senior special at Denny’s. Gives me what I need to worm my way toward the front of the vaccination line.

Woke up Wednesday thinking that by next week, I’ll be cured of the paranoia that the pandemic has cast over human encounters. This perpetual apprehension will be banished along with the other miserable detritus of 2020.

Set my alarm for 7:59. To get a jump on the masses and dial the magic number at exactly 8 a.m., the very moment the Florida Department of Health would begin accepting telephone reservations for the big jab.

Lucky me? More like silly me. Would have been easier reserving one of those $3,199 tables at the Fontainebleau’s New Year’s Eve shindig.

I might have spent the entire morning on hold, except the health department’s automated phone system kept knocking me off, erasing my place in the electronic queue.

Broward Health system’s alternative seemed no better prepared for the onslaught. The Sun Sentinel interviewed a 71-year-old retired librarian whose 183 calls to the Broward Health’s vaccine appointment line brought 183 disconnections. By Wednesday afternoon, a Broward Health press release acknowledged the obvious. “Due to overwhelming demand, we have reached capacity with our COVID-19 vaccination for the community. Scheduling will resume in the coming weeks.”

Then I tried the Broward online reservation website. Up popped: “This site can’t be reached. browardcovidaccine.com refused to connect.”

“Refused to connect” was not a soothing phrase.

News reports about the DeSantis administration’s vaccine distribution system — basically leave it to the locals — employed “fiasco” and “chaos” to describe the early going. And “frustration” — lots of frustration. “I know people are frustrated,” Jared Moskowitz, head of Florida’s Emergency Management Division, told the Orlando Sentinel. “I know the systems set up aren’t meeting the moment.”

The vaccine rollout was reminiscent of another unmet moment last spring when the state’s famously inefficient unemployment compensation system went kaput. And now, once again, it was as if it had never occurred to the gang in Tallahassee to plan for a logistical tsunami.

Broward, Orange, Manatee and Sarasota counties were all bereft of appointment slots within a couple of hours. Those systems, however overwhelmed, were considerably more humane than the first-come, first-serve mess devised by Lee County. The Fort Myers New-Press reported that hundreds of elderly people waited in the early morning darkness Tuesday, in the 40-something degree cold, wrapped in blankets and sleeping bags, like teenagers camped out overnight to nab their Taylor Swift concert tickets.

No county had enough vaccine to meet the demand.

The math was always going to be brutal. When Gov. DeSantis broke with the CDC guidelines and decided Floridians 65 and older would be a top-priority for vaccinations, he was juxtaposing 4.5 million aged Floridians against the state’s initial allotment of 767,000 doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. (About 600,000 after frontline health care workers and first responders were vaccinated.) With no clear indication when the Trump administration will deliver additional shipments. Daunting logistics seem to have warped Operation Warp Speed.

If DeSantis had limited the state’s first recipients to 85 and older (about 599,000 residents), Florida could have managed these initial inoculations without the chaos. Instead, octogenarians must jostle for a place in line with spring chickens two decades or so their junior.

A sense of urgency (and outrage) among us oldsters has been exacerbated by yet another surge of coronavirus infections. On Wednesday alone, Florida reported 13,871 new cases, the most since July, and 137 more coronavirus fatalities. If such awful numbers are the result of Thanksgiving gatherings, the consequences of Christmas may be even deadlier. Especially if the vaccine supplies remain inadequate.

Secretly, I had hoped that enough of the “COVID-is-a-hoax” crowd (AKA the “Biden stole the election” crowd) and the anti-vaxxer crazies would abstain, giving rational thinkers a better chance for an early jab. But apparently even the stupid are lining up for vaccinations. Their QAnon-fed, insanity-infused, conspiracy-theory ideology apparently doesn’t cancel out the fearsome reality of a virus that’s killing 3,700 Americans a day.

A New York Times website features an inter-active graphic on which a reader can insert his age, his home county and whether or not he suffers an aggravating medical condition. The graphic then calculates his approximate place in line among 300 million Americans needing a vaccination.

I have my number. Like at the deli. Just waiting for the guy behind the counter to shout, “Next up; Number 23 million.”

Fred Grimm