It’s becoming less chaotic to get vaccine

As eligibility opens up, supply of shots increases across state

As Florida opens up COVID-19 vaccines to younger groups, they are unlikely to encounter the chaos that roiled people 65 and older when the vaccine campaign began.

Seniors wrestled with overwhelmed phone lines, crashed websites and hourslong waits in line in January. But fears that the trouble would return as the eligible age was reduced have not materialized.

The reasons: The supply of vaccine has increased, the number of vaccination sites has grown and the number of people in various age groups is far smaller than Florida’s senior population.

Those factors all suggest that people like Russell Waldman, 58, won’t find themselves lost in the vaccine limbo that Floridians have come to expect.

When the Fort Lauderdale man learned that he would finally be eligible for a shot this week, he was primed to smash refresh on a pharmacy website or suck it up and drive to a walk-up site in Miami at the crack of dawn.

But after registering on a state website last weekend, he received a call Tuesday morning. Within minutes,

he had an appointment for a shot on Wednesday. “It couldn’t have been simpler,” he said.

A stable supply of vaccine is making that possible. The supply has remained steady for weeks as the average number of doses doled out week to week has dipped.

On March 13, Florida was distributing 188,000 vaccine doses per day, according to a seven-day average based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As of March 22, when age restrictions were lowered to 50 and older, the average daily doses hovered around 154,000.

Meanwhile, the amount of vaccine supplied to Florida during that time has increased, according to the CDC. On March 13, the state’s vaccine supply, including federal sites and pharmacies, averaged out to 196,000 vaccine doses to distribute per day. By March 22, the trend was about 221,000 doses a day.

Demographics also work in Florida’s favor. Seniors — those who were battling each other for vaccine appointments early on — make up nearly 30% of the state’s population.

Florida has almost 4.5 million residents age 65 or older, but only 1.4 million people ages 60 to 64, 2.8million from 50 to 59, and 2.4 million from 40 to 49.

That doesn’t mean everyone will breeze through to get a vaccine.

Pharmacies, hospitals and county leaders say they still see appointments snatched up fast as more people become eligible.

Walgreens, Walmart and CVS have nearly 700 combined sites in the state, and appointments fill up at nearly all of them every day, though not in the mere minutes they once did.

Publix has another 734 pharmacies administering shots in Florida. The grocer did not respond to questions about its distribution, but appointments were still available in some parts of the state later in the day on Monday.

Lidia Amoretti-Morgado, a spokeswoman for Jackson Health, Miami-Dade’s public hospital network, said the demand for their 1,500 daily appointments took a tumble in mid-February when only people over 65 could get a shot. But since the state opened things up to residents with high-risk conditions, Jackson has booked all of its appointments every day in less than 15 minutes.

Nearly 8 million people in Florida have received at least one vaccine shot, according to Department of Health data. Nearly 3 million people are fully vaccinated.

As the vaccines get to younger and smaller cohorts that are less likely to die from COVID-19, Gov. Ron DeSantis said he expects the floodgates to open to everyone soon.

The Biden administration has set a date of May 1 for having the vaccine available to all adults, but “I can tell you that in Florida, that’s going to happen way before May 1,” DeSantis said.

The seemingly relative ease of getting a shot has prompted some county mayors to open up age restrictions beyond the governor’s orders.

Miami-Dade County and Orange County will allow anyone 40 and older to get a vaccine shot.

Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings told the Orlando Sentinel on Monday that it took just 13 minutes for 7,000 county vaccine appointments to fill up after the change. He said previously that demand had been flattening.

Other counties are not ready to move so fast.

On Tuesday, Alina Alonso, the health director in Palm Beach County, shot down any plans to open age restrictions further.

The Health Care District of Palm Beach County said it has seen an increase in vaccine appointments this month and particularly between March 19 and March 21, the days immediately before restrictions loosened to include those 50 and over.

Although Alonso didn’t report any issues after the new eligibility requirements went into effect on Monday, she isn’t ready to take a victory lap just yet. She still expects a crush of demand.

“We expect to see the surge in the coming days and by next week,” she said.

As of Tuesday, though, people in Palm Beach County were finding few hurdles.

Telra Moore, 50, who lives in Deerfield Beach, said she had trouble finding an appointment online for anywhere in Broward County. On Tuesday, she was able to quickly get an appointment at South County Civic Center in Delray Beach. She had her first shot by Tuesday afternoon.

“I was 50, so I was able to go right in,” she said.