Monday was the “official” registration date for Utahns over the age of 50 and with certain health conditions, although some agencies started early.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Angela Bolt administers COVID-19 vaccine to Robert Morarty at the Mountain America Expo in Sandy on Monday, March 8, 2021.
The hottest ticket in Utah this week is a meeting for a COVID-19 vaccination, now that another 700,000 Utahns are eligible for their first jab.
Monday was the first official day for Utahns 50 and older to sign up for vaccinations, according to the new eligibility rules announced Thursday by Governor Spencer Cox. The governor also added people aged 16 and over 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 vaccines.
People rushed to fill the meeting slots as they climbed websites for county health departments, pharmacies and health companies.
[Read more: Here’s where eligible Utahns can get COVID-19 vaccination appointments]
“We thought we’d take out the appointments and they’ll be swallowed, and that’s what we saw,” said Trevor Warner, a Davis County Health Department spokesman.
On Monday, Warner booked about 1,100 appointments for people over the age of 50 receiving their first dose – and a daily number of 1,800 appointments. The department expects to administer approximately 2,100 doses per day for the remainder of this week, for a total of 11,000 to 13,000 vaccinations per week.
That should match how many doses Davis County will be allocated, Warner said. “By the time our clinic closes on Saturday, we should have no vaccine for the week,” he said.
Salt Lake County did not wait until Monday. The health department in Utah’s most populous county has scheduled meetings under the new eligibility rules within hours of Cox’s announcement Thursday.
On Friday, the Salt Lake County Department of Health scheduled 6,590 appointments through its system, said spokesman Nicholas Rupp. The county uses the Vaccinate Utah website nationwide, and as of Monday, the only meetings available on the site for this week were in Blanding, San Juan County, in the southeastern corner of Utah.
Salt Lake County still has more than 20,000 meetings available after this week, through April 3, Rupp said.
Getting an appointment through pharmacies was not easy either. The Harmons supermarket chain, whose pharmacies vaccinated at 15 locations along the Wasatch Front, posted on its website that “we are fully booked for vaccination appointments” and urged customers to return to the site Monday morning.
Intermountain Healthcare has met 90% or more of its appointments at six of the seven vaccination sites, said Lance Madigan, a hospital spokeswoman. The exception, Madigan said, was at Ogden’s McKay-Dee Hospital, which was about 80 percent full.
Intermountain staff are calling people on their waiting list to fill the remaining spaces, Madigan said.
The appointment program at the University of Utah Health was almost complete, said spokeswoman Julie Kiefer. Their system does not have open registration for the vaccine; instead, U. Health scans the electronic medical records of 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 in South Jordan and Sugar House are expected to remain vaccine-free until Wednesday due to a “temporary reduction in vaccine supply,” Kiefer said. These sites should set more appointments for vaccinations later in March, she said.
Nomi Health has seen an increase in the number of people scheduling appointments immediately after Cox’s announcement, spokeswoman Jenny Olsen said Monday. The company managed vaccination sites at five Megaplex Theaters locations along the Wasatch Front and opened a sixth clinic in Orem.
Correction, at 5:15 PM March 8, 2021: An earlier version of this article miscalculated the weekly number of vaccine doses that the Davis County Department of Health expects to administer this week.