Hundreds of people lined up outside a UW Medical Center clinic on Thursday night. (Feliks Banel, KIRO radio)
A quirky scene was staged in Seattle in the afternoon between Thursday night and early Friday morning, after hundreds of people got out of bed in hopes of receiving doses of COVID-19 vaccine that were on time. to expire.
The vaccination appointment process is a headache for Washingtonians
This came after Kaiser Permanente set up clinics, which had 1,600 doses of vaccine that were due to expire at 5:30 a.m. Friday thanks to an unexpected failure in the freezer.
Feliks Banel, of Radio KIRO, found out about 11pm on Thursday after receiving a text from a friend. Thirty minutes later, he and his wife found themselves waiting outside one of those clinics on Seattle’s northwest campus, UW Medical Center.
By 11:30 p.m., the parking lot was full, with hundreds of people already queuing. Forty-five minutes after arriving, the line had not yet moved.
“The mood was calm and peaceful, like people waiting overnight to buy tickets for a concert that would take place many months in the future (as I did at least once in the 1980s for REM at Boston Garden )”, he said. described. “He was never panicked or scared, but I found it a little surreal to come so late to something so serious.”
After some searching before the line, they learned that in addition to the hundreds of people waiting outside, there were also another 200 in line. The facility allegedly only had 500 total doses available to the assembled people.
Where to get vaccinated in Washington state
Around 12:15 a.m., a UW member began informing people passing a certain point on the line that “they were not likely to be shot based on the number of people in front of them and the number of people in front of them. number of doses remaining “.
Feliks and his wife decided to pack up and head home after this announcement, ending a surreal night for everyone involved.
“It was a strange experience, fully consistent with all the other new and weird experiences of the last year or so – social distancing, toilet paper shortage, masking, COVID car testing – and it gave me even more gratitude for my parents’ lives are much more traumatic individual experiences in the war Europe of 80 years ago, ”he explained.
UW Medical Center told the Seattle Times that it managed to distribute all the doses it had of the expired vaccine. It is unclear whether the Swedish and Kaiser clinics were similarly successful to their hospital clinics.