At 91, Bob Stannard still lives alone on his Gilroy ranch and religiously reads the newspaper from his living room armchair every morning, but his body doesn’t work exactly as it did before.
Stannard has stage 4 prostate cancer. He is also diabetic, depends on a catheter and uses a walker to travel short distances around the house. In between several traumatic falls in the past two years and his series of medical conditions, Stannard – a member of Kaiser Permanente for the past five decades – visits the hospital and its doctors more than most.
Still, while thousands of people across the state who are younger than Stannard managed to secure a COVID-19 vaccination appointment last week, the Stannard family is scratching it.
“Surprisingly, Kaiser has all this information and we still haven’t gotten a response from anyone,” said Stannard’s son-in-law, Dan Morgan. “The selection process reminds me of a game of Bingo. I just don’t understand how they found this out. “
When Governor Gavin Newsom announced last week that the state would allow vaccinations for people over 65, Kaiser did the same. But opening the floodgates for healthcare professionals to hundreds of thousands of others has proved chaotic. Congested phone lines and online scheduling systems quickly overloaded with scheduling requests.
On Tuesday – just a week after opening appointments for people aged 65 and over – Kaiser announced that it was now limiting vaccines to people aged 75 and over. Today, however, even those who fit the new parameters are no longer able to call, email or use the health provider’s online system to make an appointment. In essence, Kaiser told them not to call us, we will call you.
Kaiser is not alone. County health departments and health care providers across the state say the long-awaited distribution of the vaccine has been hampered by a low and inconsistent dose delivery.
As a result, despite caring for 1.5 million members aged 65 and over, Kaiser said last week that he received only 20,000 doses for that age group.
Dorothy Wickenhiser, 71, of Livermore, was one of the lucky ones.
She waited eight hours on the Kaiser phone line last week before finally hearing the voice of a receptionist on the other end of the line – at 2 am
After living in fear since last March that she and her husband – who died this summer of lung disease – could contract the virus, Wickenhiser said he grabbed the chance to get a vaccine as soon as he knew he was eligible.
Wickenhiser said he was unaware of the changes Kaiser has since made and felt “extremely lucky” to have an appointment scheduled for a week.
“They said they were concerned that people didn’t want to get the injection, but I can say that I don’t know anyone in my age group who isn’t bothering,” she said. “… I’m just keeping my fingers crossed now that they won’t call and cancel.”
In a statement to this news organization, Kaiser said he was “following state guidelines and prioritizing patients who are most at risk of mortality or other serious illnesses, as well as those who live in vulnerable communities”.
But the relatives of some of California’s oldest residents who are the most vulnerable to succumb to COVID-19 say they are not seeing this policy in place.
Mark Rakich’s 90-year-old mother, Carol, suffered a bad fall inside her home in Los Gatos two weeks ago and broke her shoulder. Doctors recommended that she spend 6 to 8 weeks recovering in a specialized health facility, but because of the outbreaks of COVID-19 in nursing homes across the country, Mark Rakich and his family decided to bring her home and take care of it themselves.
Carol Rakich’s family is now looking for a home care provider to help her, but the risk of bringing in someone else who could transmit the disease is weighing heavily on them.
Like Stannard’s family, the Rakiches tried everything they could to get Carol a vaccine appointment – from emails to her doctors offering to take her to any facility in the bay area to calls to supervisors in the member services department. Kaiser – without any luck.
“I don’t know what to do with it,” said Mark Rakich. “This is a unique patient with unique circumstances.”
Rakich, whose 65-year-old close friend recently received his first dose of vaccine, called it “shocking” that there was no way forward to inoculate someone at risk as high as his mother before other less critical patients.
“I’m not asking you to jump to the front of the line. I am asking that a 90-year-old woman with diabetes, kidney and heart problems, who needs help to go to the bathroom, be placed on the list in front of a healthy 65-year-old woman, ”he said.
COVID-19 took the lives of more than 3,300 Californians last week – an average of approximately 482 a day, or one every three minutes.
As for Stannard, he can’t wait to go to the nursery again to build his garden, resume family dinners on Tuesday evenings, finish reading “Alone in the Wilderness” and maybe even enjoy a traditional holiday celebration with all the family.
“I can’t wait to get it,” said Stannard of the vaccine. “I am totally in favor of living with this.”