The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Amid COVID chaos, cancer survivor awaits vaccine
David D’Andrea knows COVID-19 would kill him if he came down with it.
He’s made it through almost 11 months of fear and isolation, living alone with an immune disease that took part of a lung, as a rectal cancer survivor with type-2 diabetes and hypertension. All of those conditions make the coronavirus especially deadly; any might qualify him for an early dose of the vaccine that everybody wants.
The dapper Greenwich resident, godfather to the first selectman, retired town employee and friend to the governor, is 69. As of this week, after a battle he helped wage, his age group — 65 to 74 — landed on the list of people eligible for the vaccine in “Phase 1B” that started Thursday.
And so, this inoculation dangles hope for a normal life in his remaining years, time with his grandchildren and friends. But Phase 1B isn’t a phase at all. With 1.4 million people in five big categories, it’s a blueprint that could take months, perhaps deep into the spring.
“If I have to wait five months, I’m done. I know I’m done,” D’Andrea told me Thursday night after he watched Gov. Ned Lamont and his top aides ask for patience in the vaccine rollout during the twice-weekly, live-streamed briefing I call the Ned Variety Show. “How much longer can I isolate? I mean, come on.”
He’s not alone. And the distribution, much to the dismay of people who need order in their lives, looks more like the chaotic, multifront Vietnam War than the surgical strike of D-Day.
We hear reports of the “wrong” people getting the vaccine. Hospitals inoculate folks who work from home, supposedly a no-no. We’re changing who comes next on the list even as we dole out the shots.
We’re creating rules on the fly: You can’t be too loose like Florida, where every clinic is a mob scene; or too strict like New York, where nitpicking over who’s eligible has gummed the system with ridiculous and needless delays.
D’Andrea, as a former operations chief for the Greenwich municipal golf course, understands that all this cacophony isn’t disorganization.
“He seems to be listening to the science, to his advisers, to the data,” the lifetime Republican and former Representative Town Meeting member said of Lamont. “I don’t think it’s a bad chaos ... as they go along they can adjust and reel it in.”
Bonus doses from the feds
After a month, Connecticut stands in the top five among states, with 5 percent of the adult population vaccinated, mostly health care workers or nursing home residents, the denizens of Phase 1A. We could still speed up the machine a bit, based on the numbers of doses coming in.
But the state’s success led Alex Azar, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to tell Lamont directly that Connecticut will receive an extra 50,000 doses next week — a reward that will nearly double the state’s normal allotment.
Better still, the bonus shipments are not just a one-shot, though it’s unclear how many doses we’ll collect in the coming weeks, beyond our proportional share. “The feds are signaling that strong execution will be rewarded.
They want to see doses go to use as quickly as possible,” Josh Geballe, the state’s chief operating officer, told me Thursday night.
The coronavirus has amounted to a nightmare pandemic for order freaks, people who need nice, neat answers. The irrational rise and fall of the illness; the inherently unfair shutdown rules with inconsistent enforcement; the messy federal bailouts; and mostly, the unpredictable way COVID-19 strikes down some victims and not others — all of it creates a fiction-like smorgasbord of stress that rips through our comfort limits.
Why should the vaccine rollout happen perfectly smoothly? Consider, the state needs to build a system to move hundreds of thousands of crazily finicky doses to a legion of clinics and into people’s arms faster than we thought possible.
Lamont asks for a few weeks for the state to sort out this most important phase.
Breaking down the waiting groups
The numbers say many people such as D’Andrea, as worthy a vaccine candidate as you’ll find, will just have to wait a bit longer. As of Thursday, Connecticut had vaccinated 155,000 people, 16,000 of them with the requisite second doses.
In the last seven days, health providers working with the state injected 62,650 first and second doses. A total of 66,750 Pfizer and Moderna doses arrived in that time.
We still had 71,000 doses on hand Thursday that hadn’t yet found their way into arms, but a lot of that was due to allocations for nursing homes that have their own system. “Definitely a good start out of the gate,” Dr. Deidre Gifford, the public health commissioner, told a meeting of the vaccine advisory committee Thursday night.
Lamont, Geballe and Gifford say the state can ramp up much faster. Let’s say we reach 100,000 first doses a week. That’s three months to get through Phase 1B, just for the first dose, depending on demand. It could take longer or shorter.
Who’s in this battleground phase? The charter members: People age 75 and older not in long-term care, 277,000 of them, began registering Thursday, some even earlier as the federal registration system somehow let them in. That “soft launch” created confusion out in coronaland, as my colleague Erin Kayata documented, but state officials were happy to see it.
Also on the original 1B list, people in congregate housing: Prisoners, group home residents, those in homeless shelters, 46,000 in all. And essential workers in front-line, people-facing jobs like food service, police and much more, 530,000 in number.
Added to the list just Thursday, based on recommendations from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Lamont’s advisory committee, were 350,000 people age 65 to 74, like D’Andrea; and people under 65 with certain underlying medical conditions, which include smoking and obesity; there are 360,000 of them.
All of these groups add up to more than 1.6 million but overlap brings it down to 1.37 million.
A gantlet for Gifford
Faced with an uproar, Lamont and his brain trust decided we need to carve up Phase 1B into subgroups, by order of priority. Who’s next after the 75-plus club? And which essential workers make the cut? (It doesn’t include news media, if you were curious.)
“It’s going to depend on the uptake in the current groups and the number of doses that we get,” Gifford told a news reporter Thursday during the Ned Show.
The reporter wouldn’t relent. “I guess I’m not clear on why the state can’t decide now which group will be next,” she asked. Then, unsatisfied, with the answer, “I’m sorry, when will the state decide which groups will be next?”
“In the coming days and weeks.”
One minute later, when a different reporter asked basically the same question, Gifford made it clear that the vaccine providers — pharmacies, health centers, hospitals, health departments — will have leeway.
“If they are unable to fill their slots on a particular day, then they can move on to another category,” Gifford said.
Then she added, “The next group that many of the providers will move to is the front-line essential workers.”
Political football with lives at stake
That’s not the answer state Rep. Harry Arora, R-Greenwich, wanted to hear. He’s a vociferous advocate for vaccinating older people before younger frontline workers, based on the COVID-19 death rates.
“They’re moving in the right direction,” Arora said, after the 65-to-74 group made it into 1B. Then he said of Gifford, “Her credibility in my eyes is not that high because Lamont just supersedes her.”
Translaton: He sees it as a political football with lives at stake. The reality is, this is a fluid system in which all the groups will rise and fall on the health providers’ lists. Health equity for hard-hit populations, chiefly urban Black and Latinx, also plays a role in who gets the shots when.
D’Andrea sits at home, watching all this unfold, knowing his place in line could determine whether he sees the next U.S. Open golf tournament. He lost a few friends to COVID last year and wrote a memoir of his health struggles, hope and faith, which my colleague Ken Borsuk wrote about.
He’s anxious behind a handlebar mustache, forceful but also a model of cool understanding.
“You show me who can do this in perfect order,” D’Andrea said. “They’re all doing their best. It’s going to be chaotic.”