Survey Results: Your Vaccine Story - Part II

Your thoughts, your story, our local covid experience...February Survey compared to April Survey. Thank you for taking the time to share! Your opinions, hopes, and stories are so appreciated. In February, and then again in April, I emailed a survey asking a few consistent questions and looking to get a better understanding of your experience. I sincerely hope you find this as interesting as I do!

For optimal viewing, please use PC, laptop or desktop,

February 2021

The April survey, to the right, showed more respondents receiving their vaccine locally and less having to travel to another county. At the time of the February survey pharmacies were not yet offering covid-19 vaccination.

________________________________________________________________________________

In the April survey, 99% of the respondents had received or planned to receive a vaccine. Here are a few excerpts of their comments:

Please share why chose to get vaccinated or chose not to get vaccinated.

Chose to:

• I want to see my dad! I haven't seen him in over a year.

• duh...

• Got vaccinated due to risk of serious, prolonged illness or death from Covid.

• I chose to because I know several people who had covid, at least two of whom have died from it.

• To know I won't cause death or sickness to those around me and to avoid getting covid again - it was awful.

• I want to be protected so that I can get back to living.

• I was convinced of both the safety and the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine which was offered to me, and I knew that the only reasonable course of action was to do everything I could to avoid contracting the disease.

• To help prevent Covid spread and prevent other strains. To love my community in actions.

• I work in healthcare and wanted to protect myself and others.

• I value science, my life, and the lives of others.

• Protect myself and my family as well as co workers.

• I have been vaccinated for other diseases over the years; and thought it a good idea to be vaccinated for Covid-19 as well. The health risk of the shot(s) was considerably less than the risk of the disease itself.

• To protect myself, my family and my community.

Chose not to:

• All of the vaccines are approved for experimental treatment. I prefer not to be the lab rat. The efficacy of these shots is about 95% but my chance of recovering from the Covid is 99% given I have no co-morbidities. I'll go with the better odds. I don't know or want the long term effects of mRNA nanobots changing my DNA.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The April survey above, shows less 'poor'-end ratings in the rollout of vaccine in our State compared to the February survey, at the right, which shows an increase in higher rating.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Where do you get your information about COVID-19 and vaccines?

• Devonshire management, and Dr. Fauci

• Everywhere. PB Post, Twitter, CNN, website research

• Local TV news, Palm Beach Post, national news, emails from local officials

• Cable news, social media, and emails from Chelsea.

• The VA and our HealthCare plan provider have both been very good.

• Wow. Ok, basically everywhere. CDC is obviously a good place to start, but every decent news outlet is covering it for the most part. And breaking down all of the specifics of who told me what over the past year is a daunting task. County Commission/Health District, national news

• Dr. Fauci, Facebook groups for how to sign up for my vaccine.

• CDC, Palm Beach County, medical friends/professionals, scholarly news and sites

• Various websites and Facebook

• CDC, hospitals and Newspaper

• Through emails and the Palm Beach post. Only recently have I been receiving email updates from Palm Beach Gardens. They have been informative and helpful. I just wish we had been provided those at the beginning of the Pandemic.

• Everywhere, locally from email from PBG. Local news services

• That was the problem- for first 2-3 months no centralized place to get info. Frankly, your newsletter was the best place to get info regarding testing and vaccination information!

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please share anything at all here - any question you did not feel was addressed or to share more of your story.

• We have many Canadian friends who are still waiting to get their first vaccine OR if they've received the first one, the second one isn't scheduled until July. We are SO fortunate to live in the US and have the kind of vaccine rollout we have all been privileged to be part of!

• PBC started with one website, then moved from CFD50 to another site, then moved to still another which caused confusion as to whether or not you were transferred or had to re-apply. We joined every health dept. within a 2 hour ride in the early days because we did not feel that PBC was helpful. Then, the mistakes were made ex. Town of PB. which did not add to our confidence.

• I helped many people navigate the online system to get a vaccine. Too many people don't know how to navigate the systems or sign up. It was unnecessarily complicated, confusing, and uncoordinated. There should have been a central scheduling site that showed availability at ALL vaccination sites. It was ridiculous to have to check multiple different websites multiple times a day to get appointments.

• Our hope is that the current vaccine is effective against other variants of COVID-19 and that we'll know ahead of time if we need a booster vaccine or not. Wearing masks should be mandated until we have reached "herd immunity" that seems to be the goal.

• I sincerely hope that enough people get the vaccine so we can reach herd immunity. I'm concerned that pockets of folks against the vaccine will allow for mutations that allow the coronavirus to be endemic (and who will then turn around and use it to justify how "vaccines don't work"). Honestly at this point I have very little faith that we'll achieve that.

• The Publix signup system was terrible when first introduced. Fortunately, we already had our shots scheduled before Publix became available for shots.

• The PBC website was terrible & setting up Publix as the main source for vaccinations was not a good decision

• I want to reiterate what an amazing job the Healthcare District of Palm Beach County did with the vaccine site at the Fairgrounds. It was so incredibly easy and smooth, I recommended it to everyone we know. I reminded people that this wasn't a private company that did this, this was an agency created by the people of Palm Beach County.

• Trying to make an appointment on the day it was opened for 60 and above felt like the "Covid Vaccine Olympics". I had 4 computers open, my heart was racing, etc. It was challenging. My husband and I filled out the form for county health department shots on the same day and he never received anything about making an appointment. He got his shot at Publix. Also, I had to change my 2nd appointment. The people at the Fairgrounds told me to call a phone number. When you call that number it says "don't leave a message here if you're trying to change an appointment." Thank goodness for NextDoor (the app). I asked folks how to change the appointment and a nice neighbor shared a secret health department phone number. I called and had to be very assertive to speak with a human being who could help. They did as promised and I received a phone call to reschedule.

• I hope, as a retail employee, that mask mandates continue in this county until we are at a lower rate of infection and until the number of out of towners coming thru our area has decreased.

• We went to the CVS website at midnight and booked appointments not too far from home - about a 45 minute drive each way. We didn't know that if we waited a few more weeks we could have gone to our local CVS about a mile from home! Had we known we would have waited.

• Publix appointments were smoke and mirrors deception and poorly managed. 300,000 people all online in the entire state trying to get appointments anywhere in the state. Not reasonable. Should have been appts. per County. Health Care District was a very easy appt process with very good follow-up communications. The Governor should study how they did it.

• Burns Road was very organized and I felt comfortable having the fire department administer the shots.

• Lessons Learned - it was surprising (in a bad way) that the State and County did not have the processes and vaccine locations worked out well before Dec. 2019. Kudos to PBC Commissioner Maria Marino and Vice Mayor Reed for being proactive and transparent to fix and resolve glitches.

• As an aside I do wonder why the Covid Vaccine card is such an odd size.

THANK YOU ALL for helping me compile this information. As you know, I share this email to bring what is happening in our backyard with transparency and understanding, to your inbox. Please feel free to email me any time - communication is what I am here for!! Let me know what you want to know.

Take care & stay well,

Chelsea 😷💙

If you would like to be sent all of the stories from the anonymous comments, please email me at info@chelseareed.com.