Monday was the ‘official’ registration date for Utahns aged 50 and over and with certain health conditions, although some agencies started early.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Angela Bolt administers 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 a consultation for the COVID-19 vaccination, now that another 700,000 Utahns are eligible for their first injection.
Monday was the first official day for Utahns aged 50 and over to apply for vaccines, according to the new eligibility rules announced on Thursday by Governor Spencer Cox. The governor also added people aged 16 and over with diabetes, chronic kidney disease and body mass index of 30 or more – a level considered “obese” – to the list of those eligible for vaccines.
People rushed to fill available schedules as they accessed websites for county health departments, pharmacies and health care companies.
[Read more: Here’s where eligible Utahns can get COVID-19 vaccination appointments]
“We thought we were going to make appointments and they would be swallowed, and that’s what we saw,” said Trevor Warner, a spokesman for the Davis County Health Department.
As of Monday, Warner’s agency had scheduled about 1,100 appointments for people aged 50 and over receiving their first dose – and a daily total of 1,800 appointments. The department expects to distribute about 2,100 doses a day for the rest of this week, for a weekly total of 11,000 to 13,000 vaccinations.
This should correspond to how many doses Davis County will be allocated, Warner said. “When our clinic ends on Saturday, we should be out of the vaccine for a week,” he said.
Salt Lake County did not wait until Monday. Utah’s most populous county health department was scheduling appointments under the new eligibility rules just hours after Cox’s announcement on Thursday.
On Friday, the Salt Lake County Health Department scheduled 6,590 appointments through its system, said spokesman Nicholas Rupp. The county uses the state website Vaccinate Utah and, on Monday, the only queries available on the site for this week were in Blanding, in San Juan County, in the far southeast of Utah.
Salt Lake County still has more than 20,000 consultations available after this week, as of April 3, Rupp said.
Making an appointment at pharmacies was also not easy. The Harmons supermarket chain, whose pharmacies have given vaccines in 15 locations along the Wasatch Front, posted on its website that “we are full for vaccination appointments” and asked customers to return to the site early next Monday.
Intermountain Healthcare attended 90% or more of its consultations at six of its seven vaccination sites, said Lance Madigan, a spokesman for the hospital system. The exception, said Madigan, was at Ogden’s McKay-Dee Hospital, which was about 80% full.
The Intermountain team is calling people on its waiting list to fill the remaining vacancies, said Madigan.
The appointment schedule at the University of Utah Health was almost full, said spokeswoman Julie Kiefer. Its system does not have an open registration for the vaccine; instead, U. Health examines the electronic medical records of its existing patients and invites eligible patients to make appointments to receive the vaccine.
U. Health opened three more vaccination sites on Monday, at the system’s health centers in Farmington, South Jordan and in the Sugar House neighborhood.
The locations of South Jordan and Sugar House are expected to run out of vaccines until Wednesday, due to “a temporary reduction in vaccine supplies,” said Kiefer. These sites are expected to schedule more vaccination appointments in late March, she said.
Nomi Health saw an increase in the number of people making appointments immediately after Cox’s announcement on Thursday, spokeswoman Jenny Olsen said on Monday. The company runs vaccination sites at five Megaplex movie theater locations along Wasatch Front and has opened a sixth clinic in Orem.
Correction, 17:15, March 8, 2021: An earlier version of this article incorrectly calculated the weekly number of vaccine doses that the Davis County Health Department expects to administer this week.