Why Michigan’s senior residents are struggling to schedule COVID-19 vaccines
Updated Jan 13, 2021;
Posted Jan 13, 2021
A vial of the Pfizer COVID-19 sits on a table waiting to be administered to healthcare workers at Sparrow Hospital in Lansing, on Thursday, December 17, 2020. (Mike Mulholland | MLive.com)Mike Mulholland | MLive.com
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Michigan’s older residents are among the newly eligible groups for COVID-19 vaccination, though limited vaccine supplies and varying capabilities across the state’s 45 local health departments have made scheduling appointments difficult.
Some health departments have begun scheduling appointments and hosting clinics for residents 65 years and older, while others have announced they don’t have the supplies or capacity to begin moving onto the next priority groups, as of Tuesday, Jan. 12.
“Extreme call volumes.” Crashing servers. Cancellations. And one county says it’s been completely wiped out of vaccine supply by Monday afternoon.
Fred Peoples, left, receives the COVID-19 vaccine early Monday morning at a West Michigan clinic run by Spectrum Health. By noon, the health system said it had vaccinated 575 people in the community, and planned to vaccinate as many as 10,000 by the end of the week.
Credit C/O Spectrum Health
The airplane is being built as we fly it here, folks.
That’s the message from hospitals and local health officials around the state Monday, as they started (or in some cases, tried to start) vaccinating people 65 and older, as well as some essential workers.
As the State of Michigan moves to Phase 1B in the vaccination process, Spectrum is opening clinics around the region to help make the vaccine accessible to more people.
Who’s eligible for COVID-19 vaccine and what else to know about program expansion
Updated Jan 07, 2021;
Posted Jan 07, 2021
Deborah Rutherford, a registered nurse with Michigan Medicine, presses a cotton ball on the arm of Taylor Moody after injecting her with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at a COVID-19 vaccine clinic in the Jack Roth Clubhouse at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor on Thursday, Dec. 31, 2020.Jacob Hamilton | The Ann Arbor News
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Hundreds of thousands of Michigan residents will become eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine program starting Monday, Jan. 11, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced Wednesday.
Three weeks after launching the vaccination program for those in group 1A frontline health-care workers and residents of skilled nursing facilities the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services is now opening the program for those in group 1B as well as those age 65 to 74, Whitmer said.