Yesterday’s vaccine announcement – the one where now, anyone 40+ can go and get the AstraZeneca vaccine – wasn’t entirely unexpected… and some intelligent, forward-thinking people, earlier in the day, booked themselves appointments. At worst, you cancel it if you don’t ultimately qualify… and, if you do qualify at the end of the day, great.

I wasn’t one of those people, so by the time I started browsing London Drugs and Shoppers and other big pharmacies, all appointments were solidly booked. That being said, being resourceful meant getting on the phone and calling little pharmacies – the mom-and-pop shops that aren’t part of the provincial system and/or don’t have online booking. It took a while… but, finally… success. Booked for Thursday!

In the meantime, I’m on numerous waiting lists… Shoppers, LD, the provincial system. I guess the thing to do would be to remove myself from those lists (*after* Thursday, of course…), but I think I’ll stay on them. Not because I’ll show up to any of those appointments… and it’ll be easy to say “No thanks” when the email or text comes in… but because I’m genuinely curious to see when I’ll actually sift to the top.

The truth is, the system shouldn’t actually work this way. There should be exactly one list, and if you didn’t know any better, you still might think there is… the big provincial list that’s a bit confusing; the one where anyone can register any time, but you’re told to wait till it’s your turn to register. And where registering only means you’re now on the long waiting list, till your cohort comes up.

But there’s more than one list. Shoppers has one. London Drugs has one. Ostensibly, the provincial system should feed into that, but this pandemic will long be over by the time that integration would ever take place.

That part of the system is broken, but what’s not broken is the demand. As obscure as it is to figure out how to book an appointment, it’s not like pharmacies are dealing with overflowing fridges of vaccine. It’s getting into arms as fast as it’s showing up. As long as that keeps up, great. We keep hearing that we’ll all have one shot at least by July 1st… and, at this pace, perhaps that’ll turn out to be true.

With parallel lines of vaccine deployment and demand still ahead of supply, the important part of it is happening. It’s not entirely fair, but I’ll put out there what I did to a lot of people yesterday: If you’re having problem trying to find a pharmacy to give you the shot, send me a PM and I’ll happily give you the contact details of the place I found. The one where me, my cousin, and several friends will all be visiting on Thursday. I am so looking forward to it.

And speaking of looking forward, we are in the midst of the third wave, so no need to keep looking at first and second wave info… the graphs below are all current and concise as to what’s been going on since March 10th… and also looking forward, below those are vaccination graphs. It’s nice, for once, to look at exponentially-growing graphs that convey good news. To hell with flattening the curve; these ones we want getting steep as soon as possible. And, to be honest, they’re looking pretty good.