Hundreds were lined up late Thursday evening in front of a UW Medical Center clinic. (Feliks Banel, KIRO Radio)
A peculiar scene took place in Seattle late between Thursday night and Friday morning after hundreds of people woke themselves out of bed hoping to receive COVID-19 vaccine doses hours away from expiration.
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This came after clinics were set up by Kaiser Permanente, which had 1,600 vaccine doses that were due to expire at 5:30 a.m. on Friday due to an unexpected freezer malfunction.
Feliks Banel of KIRO Radio found out about 11 p.m. on Thursday after receiving a text message from a friend. Thirty minutes later, he and his wife were waiting outside one of those clinics on the Northwest campus of UW Medical Center in Seattle.
At 11.30pm the parking lot was full and hundreds of people were already queuing. Forty-five minutes after they arrived, the line still hadn’t moved.
“The mood was calm and calm, like people waiting at night to buy tickets to a concert that was to take place many months in the future (as I did at least once for REM at the Boston Garden in the 1980s),” he described. “It never felt panicky or scary, but it seemed a bit unreal to be out so late for something so serious.”
After some scouting for the line, they found out that in addition to the hundreds of people waiting outside, another 200 were lined up inside. The facility supposedly had only 500 total doses available to the assembled crowd.
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At around 12:15 a.m., a UW staff member began informing people past a certain point in the queue that “they probably wouldn’t have a chance based on the number of people ahead and the number of doses left.”
Feliks and his wife decided to pack up and go home after that announcement, ending a surreal night for everyone involved.
“It was a bizarre experience, in keeping with all the other new and strange experiences of the past year or so – social distance, toilet paper shortage, masking, drive-through COVID testing – and made me even more appreciative of the much more traumatic individual experiences in wartime Europe 80 years ago, ”he explained.
The UW Medical Center told The Seattle Times it managed to disperse every dose of the expiring vaccine. It’s unclear if Swedish and Kaiser clinics saw similar success for their hospitals’ clinics.