Demand changed vaccine eligibility
City, county hope more will register for shots
Demand slack for COVID-19 vaccinations drove the city of Memphis and Shelby County to open up vaccinations to everyone 16 and older, city and county leaders said Tuesday.
The city of Memphis and Shelby County announced Monday that appointments for everyone eligible would open Friday for vaccinations next week. The move is a long-awaited one for thousands of people who haven’t been eligible for a vaccine because they weren’t old enough or didn’t have pre-existing conditions. It also marks the start of the final push towards herd immunity from COVID-19 and an attempt to return to some sort of normalcy.
“Our aim is to get as many shots into as many arms as fast as we possibly can. And the phenomenon that we were seeing was not only were we not having all of our appointments filled, but we were having people double book and triple booked appointments and then being no shows,” said Doug Mcgowen, the city’s chief operating officer and leader of vaccine efforts for Shelby County.
The move towards eligibility for nearly everyone could lead to demand outstripping supply again, something that hasn’t been the case over the past few weeks as the city and county have had to put out repeated calls for appointments to be filled.
Mcgowen said Tuesday that the public may need to be patient in waiting for their vaccine and the city and county expect a surge in demand when appointments open to everyone on Friday.
He said the city and county expect
to receive about 10,000 more doses a week starting the first week of April, going from about 30,000 doses to about 40,000 doses a week.
“I’ll ask for a little bit of patience. Again, our goal is, every vaccine that I receive is matched to an appointment every appointment has a person that fills that appointment. Nobody has to wait an excessive period of time. And that’s how we will be most efficient and effective,” Mcgowen said. “We can have significant uptake but it’s not going to be enough to do everybody in one week or even one month.”
Men are showing hesitancy, second dose appointments slow to fill
Mcgowen and David Sweat, the deputy director of the Shelby County Health Department, said men are lagging behind women in terms of vaccinations and that many people are waiting longer than they need to schedule their second dose appointments for either the Pfizer or the Moderna vaccines.
“We need to get vaccinated those of us who are men. And so, if you’re a guy and you haven’t scheduled a shot or you’ve been sort of not thinking about it, this is the time to think about it because it’s available and we all need to do our part to protect the community by getting the shot,” Sweat said.
He said about 60% of the 177,191 people who have received a shot so far have been women.
Mcgowen said the city and county have also noticed that people are taking their time to schedule second-dose appointments and waiting longer than the minimum 21 days for the Pfizer vaccine and 28 days for the Moderna vaccine.
“The track record is that people have not been taking it as diligently. I will use myself as an example. I received the vaccine I, late one day, had an available vaccine. I received it. I was due at the end of last week, I shouldn’t be receiving my vaccine this week I have not yet scheduled my appointment. I don’t think I’m atypical .... I think that’s happening, and that’s one of the reasons why we’re not seeing the uptake,” Mcgowen said.