Ontario residents will be waiting in line over their computers for the next several months. And area residents will probably be waiting in line even longer. On Monday just before nine in the morning I went online to discover how long people over 80 would wait to register for an appointment to receive their first vaccination shot. The waiting line at that moment was over 15,000, with my number to register being over 65,000. The wait to register for an appointment was estimated to be 18 minutes and I would be able to complete the registration in 23 minutes.
Because I am not over 80, I couldn’t go forward and register. Hopefully by mid April, those 70 and older will be able to register for an appointment to be vaccinated. It would be wonderful to learn how the vaccinations will roll out across the Rainy River district.
I chuckle at how northwestern Ontario appears to have been forgotten. Anyone 60-64 in the Greater Toronto area and several other areas of southern Ontario could visit a pharmacy to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine. None was made available to pharmacies in the north.
In the district not all care givers of residents at Rainycrest or other district facilities were able to receive the vaccine because all doses were given out and today we are again standing in line patiently waiting for a phone call to receive a time for vaccination. Those who did receive that first vaccination subsequently received notice that instead of waiting 28 days for their second dose, the timeline had been extended to 102 days.
Dr. Kit Young Hoon the medical officer for the region expects that those seniors who began registering for the vaccine on Monday should be able to begin receiving their shots in early April. She also admits that this region is running about a month behind the rest of the province in vaccinations.
I can cheer that a vaccine is now being distributed and that there are plans afoot to be vaccinated. But I am impatient seeing other provinces and other areas of Ontario moving ahead faster with vaccinations than in our region.
Jim Cumming
Former Publisher
Fort Frances Times
