Florida seniors camp in frigid temperatures for the COVID-19 vaccine

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – The pressure to vaccinate over 65s in Florida is attracting thousands of eager seniors in uneven rollouts in different counties, some of whom are so determined to get a chance to sleep in their cars at night.

In Daytona Beach, hundreds of seniors determined to get vaccinated against COVID-19 camped in their vehicles in frigid temperatures to get the coveted spots on a vaccination line on Tuesday morning, a day after seniors blocked roads to the vaccination site.

Officials tried to prevent a repeat of Monday’s traffic jams by opening a stadium’s parking lot to provide overnight accommodation for people over 65. Monday at 7:30 pm, there were seniors in 200 vehicles on the property, defying nighttime temperatures in the low 1940s.

“We have blankets and we have pillows, so we’re okay,” Mary Wilde told WESH.

A few hours north, in Clay County, a small region in northern Florida, people booked online appointments and walked in for their scheduled vaccination.

“Very fast, very easy. It didn’t hurt, ”said 70-year-old Teresa Knight. She and her 74-year-old husband received the vaccine on Tuesday morning after making an online appointment. “It gives me hope that we might come out on the other side. I know it will be difficult in the coming months, but I have hope. “

Some counties used Eventbrite, an event management and ticketing website, to schedule vaccination appointments.

Broward County Mayor Steve Geller said at a news conference on Tuesday that he is being bombarded with emails and phone calls from seniors angry about how the vaccine is spreading.

“Many seniors panic because they think they have been promised the vaccine immediately,” Geller said, adding that some have gotten that impression after Governor Ron DeSantis issued an executive order giving priority to people over 65. “They were. they don’t, but not now. they feel like the faith has been broken. “

Geller added that the state simply does not currently have enough doses for all of Florida’s 4.5 million seniors, including the 340,000 who live in Broward County.

“Not everyone will be vaccinated tomorrow, next week or next month,” he said.

In Miami, all applications and appointments for vaccinations offered on a website launched Tuesday were taken within minutes, The Miami Herald reported.

Tania Leets, a spokeswoman for the Miami-based Jackson Health System, said 5,330 health workers have been vaccinated, including staff, contractors and doctors and residents of the University of Miami. Of the more than 12,000 employees, 875 chose not to receive the vaccine immediately.

Tuesday at 5:00 p.m., more than 289,000 Floridians had been vaccinated, most of them health workers and first responders – about 1.3% of the state’s population.

In John Knox Village, a retirement community outside Fort Lauderdale, 50 of the roughly 250 skilled nursing unit employees will be vaccinated Wednesday as part of a state program, three weeks after 80 other employees received their first injection, said Mark Rayner, the director of health services of the village.

Rayner said that staff members who initially refused the injection because they feared unknown side effects would slowly emerge, seeing their colleagues have no adverse effects and learning more about how the vaccine was developed. He said he would like to get 100 percent, especially among nursing assistants who have the closest daily contact with the community’s 100 residents, but the vaccine is not mandatory. All of them wear extensive protective clothing when in contact with residents, even the workers who have been vaccinated.

“The number 1 concern was how quickly the vaccine became available,” Rayner said. Developing a new vaccine usually takes years, but for this new corona virus it was ready in nine months. He said workers did not understand that the government has been researching this type of vaccine for years and has spent billions of dollars speeding up the process after the pandemic started.

The state has received more than 960,000 doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, of which 700,000 doses are waiting to be injected into the arms of Floridians in freezers. Two doses are required for both vaccines: an initial vaccination and a booster injection weeks later.

About 83% of those who die of the disease in Florida are over the age of 65. Florida has one of the oldest populations in the country.

On Monday during press conferences, DeSantis warned hospitals against applying vaccines and urged them to speed up their efforts to vaccinate older Floridians.

On Tuesday, DeSantis said supermarket chain Publix will be giving vaccinations to people over 65 in three counties in central Florida later this week.

As of Tuesday morning, there were 7,363 COVID-19 hospital admissions in Florida. According to state health service statistics, nearly 1.4 million people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and more than 22,000 people have died since the start of the pandemic.

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Associated Press journalists Tamara Lush in St. Petersburg, Florida, and Brendan Farrington in Tallahassee, Florida, contributed to this report.