Monday was the “ official ” filing date for Utahns ages 50 and older and with certain health concerns, although some agencies started early.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Angela Bolt will administer the COVID-19 vaccine to Robert Morarty, at the Mountain America Expo site in Sandy on Monday, March 8, 2021.
The hottest ticket in Utah this week is an appointment for a COVID-19 vaccination, now that another 700,000 Utahns are eligible for their first shot.
Monday was the first official day for Utahns 50 and older to sign up for the vaccinations, under new admission rules announced Thursday by Gov. Spencer Cox. The governor also added people 16 and older with diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and a body mass index of 30 or higher – a level considered “obese” – to the list of those eligible for the vaccines.
People rushed to fill appointment schedules while visiting websites for regional health departments, pharmacies, and health companies.
[Read more: Here’s where eligible Utahns can get COVID-19 vaccination appointments]
“We thought we would make the arrangements and they would be gobbled up, and that’s what we saw,” said Trevor Warner, a spokesman for the Davis County Health Department.
By Monday, Warner’s agency had booked about 1,100 appointments for people 50 and older who got their first dose – and a total of 1,800 appointments per day. The department expects to give approximately 2,100 doses per day for the remainder of this week, for a weekly total of between 11,000 and 13,000 vaccinations.
That should correspond to how many doses of Davis County will be assigned, Warner said. “By the time our clinic ends on Saturday, we should be without vaccination for a week,” he said.
Salt Lake County didn’t wait until Monday. The health department in Utah’s most populous county made appointments within hours of Cox’s announcement on Thursday under the new admission rules.
On Friday, the Salt Lake County health department has scheduled 6,590 appointments through its system, spokesman Nicholas Rupp said. The county uses the nationwide Vaccinate Utah website, and by Monday the only available appointments at the site for this week were in Blanding, in San Juan County in the far southeast corner of Utah.
Salt Lake County still has more than 20,000 appointments available after this week, through April 3, Rupp said.
Making an appointment through the pharmacy was also not easy. Supermarket chain Harmons, whose pharmacies have distributed vaccinations at 15 locations along the Wasatch Front, posted on its website that “we are fully booked for vaccination appointments” and urged customers to check back on the site next Monday morning.
Intermountain Healthcare had fulfilled 90% or more of its appointments at six of the seven vaccination sites, said Lance Madigan, a hospital system spokesperson. The exception, Madigan said, was at Ogden’s McKay-Dee Hospital, which was about 80% full.
Intermountain staff are calling people on the waiting list to fill the remaining slots, Madigan said.
The appointment schedule at University of Utah Health was nearly full, spokeswoman Julie Kiefer said. Their system does not have an open registration for the vaccine; instead, U. Health scans patients’ existing electronic medical records and invites eligible patients to make appointments to receive the vaccine.
U. Health opened three more vaccination centers on Monday, at the system’s health centers in Farmington, South Jordan and in the Sugar House neighborhood.
The sites in South Jordan and Sugar House are expected to run out of vaccines by Wednesday, due to “a temporary reduction in vaccine supply,” Kiefer said. Those sites should make more appointments for vaccinations later in March, she said.
Nomi Health saw an increase in people scheduling appointments immediately after Cox’s announcement Thursday, spokeswoman Jenny Olsen said Monday. The company has run vaccination sites at five Megaplex Theaters locations along the Wasatch Front and opened a sixth clinic in Orem.
Correction, 5:15 pm March 8, 2021: An earlier version of this article misrepresented the weekly number of vaccine doses the Davis County Health Department expects to administer this week.