On Thursday an erroneous text alert was sent out to people saying if they showed up to the local mass vaccination site, they would get a shot whether they had an appointment or not. This lead to a MASSIVE traffic jam with hundreds of cars snaking through neighborhoods and blocking people from even getting out of their driveways.
Residents weren't happy, the cops weren't happy, the workers weren't happy, and the people stuck in line (valid appointments or not) weren't happy.
My appointment was for 12:05 and I got to the area around 11:45 or so not sure what to expect. I can best describe it as something akin to waiting in line at Disneyland. You wait in line and think you're at the end of the que only to see there's another que to go through after that, and then another after that. All told it took me around 3 hours sitting in my car snaking my way through a long ass line.
To help keep things moving they cut the post shot observation time from 30 to 15 minutes but it's still a huge bottleneck. Apparently the whole system was running smoothly until this week when they opened the floodgates and now they're doing the best they can with the huge increase in volume.
so far the deliveries are matching the published detailed schedule... which tells us the coming five weeks will see a total of 8.5M doses to be delivered, or an average of 1.7M per week... slightly higher than the current 1.5M per week I'm seeing, but no radically large ramp-up. *That* is scheduled for Q2, allegedly for an average of 4.8M from the current three companies per week on average... maybe a quarter more double-dose-equivalent if J&J hits the ground running as hoped for. We'll know by the end of March, or as soon as the detailed schedules for April are out.
