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Comment by elindbe3 | Hacker News Reader

I asked this same question yesterday. Unfortunately they seem to be taking their sweet time.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-19-vaccine...

>The C.D.C. reported that about 1.2 million people in nursing homes and long-term-care centers had been given first shots through a federal program, though more than 4.7 million doses had been distributed for those facilities.

Wtf? How have they lost 3.5m doses? They can't all be "delivered to site but not used yet" can they?

Thanks BTW, I'm shocked by this news.

Michigan lists some data about the long term care on this page: https://www.michigan.gov/coronavirus/0,9753,7-406-98178_1032...

The companies running the vaccinations for those facilities have visited ~10% of the facilities so far. I suppose they have a large allocation despite that rate because the populations in the facilities tend to be high risk.

The easier to handle vaccines can't come soon enough at this point. Hopefully the production issue with the J&J vaccine doesn't impact later batches (hopefully having them producing tens of millions of doses by April and May).

Seems like a bad misallocation. If they can only deliver a third of the vaccinations, someone else should be given the others to deliver. Either to the same group or whoever they can reach...

Yeah, I don't know. They've only been active for ~1/2 of the vaccination period and have delivered almost 1/7 of the doses administered in Michigan. If the storage isn't problematic, I don't have an issue with them having some lead time.

(giving a dose to a vulnerable person in a few days is pretty clearly more beneficial than giving it to a low risk person today; if the administration wasn't performing well vs the rest of the state or the interval were longer it'd be a more difficult consideration)

Yeah, that makes sense. I would say that 3.5m is a LOT to have and not have given out. 3.5m people vaccinated, if 1% get covid, that's 35,000 cases. That's dead plus 350 dead plus 1750 hospitalisations (1 and 5% respectively). Probably a lot higher if its vulnerable people getting going without.

I suppose we'd need a lot more data to confirm whether this understandably part of a ramp up or if its evidence of incompetent management...

It definitely is a lot to have and not have given out, but the overall ratio is something like 15 million doses administered out of 40 million distributed.

(It's not clear if is really 40 million, but slow administration is a broad issue. And now there's a question of how much is going to be available each week; if the supply is X/week, it's going to be hard to convince people to build the capability to administer 2x/week)

>giving a dose to a vulnerable person in a few days is pretty clearly more beneficial than giving it to a low risk person today

That's not entirely clear to me, if the "low risk" person is in a position to be a superspreader. Vaccinating a supermarket checkout worker now, vs an elderly person (who gets delivery food and never meets anyone) in a few days, could easily save many more lives.

> How have they lost 3.5m doses?

Low paid staff stealing them and selling them on the private market. Single dose was going for over $5000 a few weeks ago.

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