I should have known better
With a [county] like you
A few days ago, I woke up to find an e-mail from my county’s department of health that invited me to schedule an appointment for a covid-19 vaccination at a local high school.
I responded to it toot sweet, and was rewarded with an e-mail that read as follows:
this very welcome message:
Your Vaccination Appointment is Confirmed!
This message is to confirm that [2 or 3 lines] is scheduled for a vaccination appointment at:
Venue/Location: Richard Montgomery High School
Address: 250 Richard Montgomery Drive, Rockville, MD 20852
Date: 02/11/2021
Time: 09:20 am
We look forward to seeing you!
Your Vaccination Provider
When I arrived at the school’s parking lot, it was absolutely full. So I parked at a nearby bank and hustled over to join a very long line of vaccine hopefuls outside the high school.
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Here’s how Bethesda Magazine described the scene that greeted me:
PEOPLE WAITED OUTSIDE IN LINE FOR
TWO HOURS-PLUS ON THURSDAY
AT VACCINE SITE IN ROCKVILLE
In near-freezing temperatures Thursday afternoon, a line of people anxious to receive a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine at Rockville’s Richard Montgomery High School stretched from one side of the building, past the baseball stadium and onto Fleet Street in the surrounding neighborhood.
Many in line had been waiting two hours or more, despite having an appointment for Thursday’s vaccination clinic. And many were elderly.
“Well, it’s not fun. The line is about three blocks,” said 79-year-old Michael Stolar.
* * * * *
I didn’t stand around for two-plus hours. As I was walking toward the end of the line, I heard a woman in an official-looking yellow jacket shouting instructions to the assembled multitudes.
“ONLY HEALTH-CARE WORKERS AND THOSE 75 YEARS OLD AND OLDER WILL BE VACCINATED TODAY – NO TEACHERS, NO ONE AGES 65-74!” she bellowed as she walked up and down the line of people waiting to get vaccinated.
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“I’m not the one who makes the decisions!” she responded to those who protested that they had been given appointments for shots. “Call your County Council member and complain!”
There was clearly no point in arguing with her or anyone else. So I called it a day and skedaddled rather than wasting any more of my time.
* * * * *
I’ve lived in Montgomery County, Maryland – which borders Washington, DC – since 1982.
When USA Today ranked the 25 best American counties to live in, “MoCo” – which is what we residents called our beloved county for short – easily made the cut. (There are 3243 counties and county equivalents in the U.S., so that ranking put MoCo in the top one per cent.)
Here’s how USA Today explained why MoCo – which is the most populous of Maryland’s 24 counties, with just over one million residents – ranked so high on that list:
Montgomery County is one of the most affluent and well-educated counties in the country. The typical Montgomery County household earns $100,352 a year, far more than the $55,322 national median household income. An estimated 58.1% of adults in the county have a bachelor’s degree, a larger share than all but 10 U.S. counties. Montgomery County residents also have some of the best health outcomes in the nation. The life expectancy at birth in the county is 81.5 years, approximately 2.4 years longer than the national life expectancy.
One reason that our citizenry ranks as high as it does when it comes to education is that there are a large number of government scientists who live in MoCo.
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We’re home to the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the National Library of Medicine, the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (formerly known as the Bethesda Naval Hospital), The Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (which includes the National Weather Service), the US Department of Energy, the US Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards & Technology, and others too numerous to mention.
In other words, our county is chock-full of biologists, chemists, computer scientists, engineers, epidemiologists, geneticists, meteorologists, physicists, physicians, statisticians, and other assorted scientific types.
Given all that brainpower, you would think that MoCo could administer a covid-19 vaccination program in an organized and efficient manner.
GUESS AGAIN!
* * * * *
The last few weeks, my Facebook news feed has been full of “Woo-hoo, I got my covid vaccination today!” announcements from friends and relatives who live in or around my humble hometown of Joplin, Missouri. (Most of them have gotten not just their first shots, but also their second shots.)
Meanwhile, those of us who are in the same age group here in MoCo sit and wait . . . and wait . . . and wait.
Why is that? There’s no simple answer to that question – “It’s complicated,” as they say.
But one reason things are so f*cked up in MoCo is that the county and the state are NOT on the same page when it comes to vaccination priorities.
* * * * *
Last October, the Maryland Department of Health published a draft covid-19 vaccination plan that seemed to me to make sense. Here’s an excerpt:
The initial highest priority groups may include:
– Healthcare personnel likely to be directly exposed to or treat people with suspected or confirmed covid-19
– People at increased risk for severe illness from covid-19, including those with underlying medical conditions and people 65 years of age and older
– Other essential workers, who by the nature of their position, are unable to reduce their risk of exposure (e.g., first responders)
But somewhere along the way, politics reared its ugly head, and the state in its infinite wisdom decided on a totally F.U.B.A.R. set of vaccination priorities.
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At the top of the revised vaccination-priority heap are the members of group 1A – health care workers, nursing home residents and staff, and first responders. (I’ve got NO PROBLEM WHATSOEVER with any of those groups getting the highest priority when it comes to vaccinations.)
Next comes group 1B – which includes those who are over 75, those in assisted living and other “congregate facilities” (a term that appears to have been chosen to obfuscate the fact that it includes prison inmates), and those in the “education” and “continuity of government” groups – which includes many elected officials, including members of the state legislature. (We’ll take a closer look at the utter bullsh*t being spread by some state legislators to justify why they deserve special treatment – possibly at the cost of the lives of other Marylanders – in the next 2 or 3 lines.)
Adults aged 65-74 – who were correctly referred to in the original draft priority document as being “at increased risk for severe illness from covid-19” – have been demoted to group 1C.
In theory, we in the 65-74 age group in Maryland are now eligible to be vaccinated. But because there aren’t enough vaccine doses here to take care of all the 1B group yet, we’re still waiting.
* * * * *
The Washington Post recently published an opinion piece by a Johns Hopkins bioethicist and a Yale medical school professor that was titled “The best vaccination strategy is simple: Focus on Americans 65 and older.”
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That’s because people over 65 account for only 16 per cent of the population but more than 80 per cent of covid deaths – their risk of death or hospitalization is MANY TIMES higher than thirty- and forty-somethings. (You can click here to read the article in its entirety.)
But Maryland has chosen to flip-flop on vaccination priorities rather than following what those experts recommended in that Washington Post piece.
“Follow the science” is our official mantra. “Follow the science, except when the science conflicts with political considerations” is closer to the truth.
The clearest proof of that is the state’s decision to move government officials and teachers into group 1B – where they have priority over the 65-74 group, whose members are at MUCH GREATER risk of dying if they get covid.
Keeping the courts functioning is important, of course. But that doesn’t mean that judges and their staffs deserve higher vaccination priority than seniors and other essential workers – like grocery store employees, who can’t do their jobs remotely. EVER HEAR OF A ZOOM CALL, YOUR HONOR?
(By the way, the Maryland State Bar Association has demanded that ALL attorneys be given the same high priority as judges. Doing that is necessary for the proper functioning of the justice system, don’t you know? That’s hypocrisy with a capital “H,” of course. Most attorneys – including me – never go into a courtroom, and can easily avoid coronavirus exposure while still doing our jobs. And even litigators can handle their business – depositions, hearings, etc. – through video conference calls.)
* * * * *
The MoCo county executive and the head of the county health department had the gall to blame we, the people, for the snafu at the vaccination clinic where I had the appointment that turned out not to be an appointment.
It comes as no surprise, of course, that they failed to man up and accept responsibility for the mess, but chose instead to blame the victims of their incompetence.
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| MoCo's chief health officer and county executive say the snafu was our fault |
The county’s spin is that the problems were caused by people sharing vaccination sign-up links that were not intended to be shared – resulting in a lot of people signing up when they weren’t eligible to sign up yet.
All I know is that I filled out the registration page – including my birthdate – and was sent a confirmation by the county.
If I wasn’t eligible because I’m too young, why didn’t they reject my application and tell me to try again later?
Instead, I was sent a personalized confirmation with a specific appointment time.
According to MoCo, that’s the great state of Maryland’s fault. MoCo used a website created by the state to book vaccination appointments. Because the 65-74 group is eligible under current state guidelines, we were allowed to sign up for this clinic even though MoCo had planned all along to only give shots to health care workers and the 75-and-over crowd.
To be honest, I had my doubts about the whole thing from the outset. It seemed a little too easy, given how screwed up things had been up to this point.
To quote today’s featured song, “I should have known better.”
* * * * *
Of course, the fact that some ineligible people were given appointments when they shouldn’t have been was only one of the problems at the vaccination site I was shooed away from – despite being given an appointment.
For example, why did eligible people have to wait in line outside in the freezing cold for two-plus hours to get shots?
That’s a problem that’s unrelated to the crowd of ineligibles, who were promptly sent home – leaving only eligible people to wait in line. If the number of eligible vaccine recipients and the number of vaccine doses matched up – as they should have after all the ineligible people were sent home – why did things run so far behind schedule?
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I’m not surprised that the process didn’t run like clockwork – no one would complain about a reasonable wait beyond his or her appointment time. But to be given, say, a 10:00 AM appointment and then have to wait in line in the freezing cold until 1:00 PM?
How did that happen? I’m guessing the county didn’t arrange for enough nurses (or others who could administer shots) to be there, or that they didn’t get everything set up in time.
This wasn’t the first vaccination clinic that MoCo has had, and I do know that some of the previous clinics at other high schools have gone off without a hitch – no masses of ineligible vaccine hunters showing up, plenty of shot-givers to handle the crowds, etc. That’s why I suspect that it was the county that did most of the pooch-screwing this morning.
* * * * *
Things could be worse, I suppose: I might live in California.
From the San Jose Mercury-News:
CALIFORNIA’S MEDICAL MARIJUANA
RETAIL WORKERS MOVE TO HEAD
OF VACCINE LINE, AHEAD OF TEACHERS
It was with a sense of accomplishment that young cannabis entrepreneur Jerred Kiloh scheduled his first COVID-19 vaccine appointment for Feb. 11 in San Francisco.
Kiloh, owner of the Higher Path Collective in Sherman Oaks and president of the United Cannabis Business Association, was one of the movers and shakers responsible for nudging medical marijuana retail workers toward the front of California’s vaccine eligibility line, before some educators, emergency workers and food and agriculture workers. . . .
“Cannabis delivery drivers before school bus drivers and teachers?” Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Austin Beutner tweeted in response to a Los Angeles Times column. “Makes no sense to me.”
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Edison High School teacher Mike Walters said teachers are too essential to be passed over by cannabis industry personnel when it comes to COVID-19 vaccine distribution.
“Teachers should be prioritized ahead of the cannabis dispensaries,” said Walters, who teaches U.S. history and government at the Huntington Beach school. “We’re kind of on the front lines with these kids on a daily basis. I hope the quicker we get this vaccine to teachers then the quicker we can get all kids back in the classroom, instead of just a few of them.”
The Biden Administration’s new CDC director has said that it is possible to reopen schools safely even if teachers aren’t vaccinated – so I’m skeptical of the decision in Maryland and elsewhere to give teachers priority over seniors, who are MUCH more likely to die from covid if they are infected. (By the way, the high-priority “education” group in Maryland isn’t limited to classroom teachers – it includes support staff who may have zero contact with students.)
But this time, I’m on the side of the teachers – to give marijuana dispensary workers vaccination priority over teachers seems ridiculous.
Of course, I’ve never been a big pot guy.
* * * * *
That was quite the rant, wasn’t it?
Delivering such a rant is tiring. But fear not – I’m not too tired to deliver yet another diatribe about a much-beloved Lennon-McCartney song.
“I Should Have Known Better” was released on the A Hard Day’s Night album in July 10, 1964. It was released a few days later as the B-side of the “A Hard Day’s Night” single – which was the fifth of the Beatles’ six singles to reach #1 on the Billboard “Hot 100” in 1964.
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“I Should Have Known Better” was a typical “Beatlemania”-era Lennon-McCartney song. It had a catchy tune and a bouncy beat, and it mixed in an occasional minor chord to keep things interesting – but the lyrics were nothing special.
Like most of the early Lennon-McCartney songs we’ve been discussing, this one is a “songlet” that would have been unacceptably short without some gratuitous repetition.
Let’s consider the structure of the record, which is 2:44 long – which is probably about average for a track of that era:
Verse 1
Verse 2
Bridge
Verse 3
Guitar solo (based on the verse)
Verse 2 (repeated)
Bridge (repeated)
Outro
Strip away the redundant repetition and do a little rearranging, and you get this:
Verse 1
Verse 2
Bridge
Guitar solo
Verse 3
Outro
That would make the song about 2:00 long.
You may disagree, but I’d rather have a tight little two-minute record than one with 45 seconds of superfluous padding.
* * * * *
Click here to listen to “I Should Have Known Better.”
Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:
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