Maybe go see a real PT? I went to one and got a sequence of exercises that fixed my hip pain. The only problem is that if I stop doing the exercises, the pain returns.
Deploy T-Rex arms when using the phone.
I will if I can't fix it on my own. I really do think highly of PT, but I've been able to hack my own for several different occasions, and it's so time-consuming to do the real PT down at an office park somewhere.
It's above a Starbucks and in the same building with the orthodontist and the kids karate.
unflattering
Neither my comfortable chair nor the teapot are throwing any shade yet. Cat is still my friend as well.
Getting old sucks though. It's not like I'm exercising to look better or even to live longer. It's just shit I have to do to avoid pain.
5: That still sounds like a long walk for me.
It's Saturday morning and I'm waiting for Portugal-Morocco to start, so please forgive my mostly-lurker self from a few pompous sunny winter morning reflections.
Middle-aging is tough because it's more and more responsibilities and your kids (if you have them) have reached the stage where they can create serious miseries. Watching your parents decline and die also isn't pleasant. But if you're lucky enough to get past that and make it into old-aging, there are some decided benefits. Biggest for me was career aspirations, and accompanying regrets, diminish. Pace Joe Biden, for the rest of us, if you haven't gotten it done by 60 you aren't ever going to get it done. So time to stop worrying about that stuff, just let it go.* Second, relatedly, was retiring on the job: I taught my classes, stopped pretending to do research or keep up with the bleeding edges of the field, and eventually dumped my many service commitments. Third, there are so many things you sincerely no longer give a fig about, plus the many others where you no longer have to pretend to give a fig about them. It's both liberating and your changed attitude about stuff prepares your family for your eventual slide into dementia where your lack of boundaries and judgment will keep them on their toes. And finally, very important, you have time and a less distracted brain to find some new stuff you might like doing.
Now admittedly, your body is falling apart while all this happens and seeing your contemporaries begin to drop is mostly not agreeable. But by now you've figured out that it's time to embrace the suckage because there isn't anything else.
* I reached this stage in my life while MadMen was big on TV, and Don Draper's line to Peggy Olsen after her abortion to the effect that "you won't believe how much this never happened" resonated
Sounds great, also sounds like why the end of mandatory retirement has rendered academia so disfunctional
My exercise regime sucks these days. The peak of the past week, or for that matter multiple months, was a 3.5 mile walk. I like to think I'd be doing more but I've developed plantar fasciitis and the pamphlet of stretching exercises the doctor recommended doesn't seem to help. Then again, maybe I should try doing the exercises...
Yes, exercises are awful because they work, but you have to keep using to feel as good as you did the first time. My plantar fasciitis took something 2 years to go away. But I made it worse by not playing attention to it until I'd also developed Achilles Tendonitis. I recommend not running a half marathon with plantar fasciitis.
Watching your parents decline and die also isn't pleasant.
That is very true. It was five years of living with that for us.
serious miseries
Fun to say that ten times fast.
I've just started physical therapy for my knee. It's been going well. Can't wait to get back into some serious parkour.
17: But, Barry! The US Soccer team is counting on you!
16: you mean swishing with olive oil? If you say so.
If you pull on your face, it will stay that way.
18 Too late. But I still think I could put a better shot on goal than Kane did last night.
16: Facepull, rotator cuff exercises, scaption, all sorts of exercises for little muscles in the upper back and shoulders -- little muscles that hold posture when you're not paying attention. A-yup, a-yup. And as a bonus, you reduce the chance of injuring yourself doing heavier exercises (or, y'know, lifting that whatsit that you need to shift from A to B).
This thread reminds me that our bathroom vanity is about four inches lower than usual for vanities. I don't know why. It's not horrible because we're not tall people.
My knee has started to bother me and I've found myself kind of perplexed about what to do about it, in a medical-industrial complex kind of way. Try to see my GP (thinking that there's a 90% chance they'll say "go to a PT", but maybe not)? Go direct to a PT shop and tell them my woes? Something else?
"Limp along for years doing nothing" is entirely possible.
You should probably start with the GP. The type and triggers of the pain do hint at causes sometimes.
23 and 24: you need a prescription from a physician or advanced practice provider, e.g. nurse practitioner, physician's assistant, to get PT.
Technically, the physical therapist is not diagnosing. In practice, after an initial period a good PT might coach the doctor to write the prescription so that enough treatment will be covered, because they understand the issue better after they've spent more time working with the patient. Nurses have to do the same thing sometimes.
Oh. I thought you were explaining how to get a new vanity.
24: GP referral to orthopedist specializing in knees, then to PT. Probably want to start by making sure it's treatable by PT.
The thing to avoid is seeing orthopedic specialists who are big on knee surgery.
Limping will make other joint pain and injury more likely. Also, predators will single you out from the herd.
29: my experience locally is that the orthopedists around here don't want to see you bless you are a potential surgical case. If what you need is PT, they will send you back to your PCP for that. Not sure what health system Nathan's PCP is part of, but that's how it works in mine.
You could also ask for a referral to a physiatrist (physical medicine and rehabilitation). They also do cortisone shots.
gesundheit!
24: See a doctor. Sometimes they can help! I'm not against physiotherapy but IME a lot of them are just collecting a paycheck, not always up on what's helpful for your condition, and have a very limited perspective, which sometimes doesn't reach any further than "stretch and strengthen." I had to direct my PT to the literature that says that eccentric contractions are what helps sore tendons, not "stretch and strengthen." Really talented ones would be great but those are the exception. And sometimes PT is just irrelevant because only surgery is going to help (as for, e.g., bone spurs).
For a knee I'd see an orthopedist first, but I guess there is the chance you'd get a brushoff from an "I only do knee replacements" type. Maybe I'd start with a PCP if I actually had a PCP.
||
Are others moving to twitter alternatives? Derek Lowe and a few others I like on twitter have announced that they're moving to post. There's a waitlist and a referral mechanism. Hope it doesn't break etiquette to post this waitlist signup link: https://post.news/?r=EirlV
|>
Also, inertial confinement fusion strong enough to damage the sensors!
Also, sympathies on the knee, Nathan, no useful advice.
35 and 36: I can't figure out if I should try one (which?) or both.
IMO no single replacement. I see a Mastodon server relevant to my work that I'll join, there's a small fee. One thing I liked about twitter was the ability to sample widely really easily.
38: you have to pay or is it more like a donation?
How much if I have the username "Elon-Musk"?
have a very limited perspective, which sometimes doesn't reach any further than "stretch and strengthen."
Still pretty important advice.
My own physical therapy, after six years of success, has suddenly failed me, and I just got a prescription for steroids. If it works, I will advocate for "stretch, strengthen and steroids."
I've been on a lefty-general-interest Mastodon-variant server for years, it wasn't more complicated than choosing an email service was before there were so few. I pay my admin a little per month because admining is a pain in the neck plus also actual $, and also she/they made one site specific choice I love and a couple that I find very funny.
I don't find it hard to sample widely? You can only search hashtags, not full text, but people learn pretty rapidly to tag their stuff (not least because a lot of us follow hashtags rather than people).
And as usual once you follow *one* super-booster you're hooked into a whole lot, because they occasionally boost each other and then you follow the next one.
I'm even considering hosting a pictures-specialized instance for a branch of my family, which would be a technical stretch for me but there's a baby coming and I would like to kind of corral the pictures. Plus honestly I think they'd like it. Maybe not as much as text client groups though.
One of the last things I did before surgery was set up a Mastodon instance for myself and a small additional crew. The DIY self-host instructions were pretty straightforward even if the published documentation has a couple of gotchas. Happy to share what I learned if you do decide to create a family corral, clew.
thank you lourdes! is your crew rowing along well?
We are! There's only a couple of us that post (I can't say "toot") much, but I've been enjoying my sampler of follows from different servers. Feel free to email a pointer to your lefty-general-interest server, if you like - same for anyone else who wants to talk about mastodons off blog.
I thought you had to wait a while after surgery before rowing.
When I was looking for more info on post.news a few weeks ago, someone pointed to this post by the post.news founder about why he left Google and after reading it, I can't say I'm interested in being on a waiting list for a produce he develops. Other red flags for me are the pretend pages "reserved" for organizations that haven't actually joined the service and the now-deleted policy statement implying that "high net worth individuals" should be treated as a protected class.
It does look like it's trying to be a kind of twitter replacement rather than a twitter alternative: all the spirit of the growth-driven, venture-funded, deceptive-interface, centralized internet at a new URL. Join now!
43 reflects my experience with Mastodon. I've stopped with Twitter altogether -- just leaving the account open so I can periodically use debirdify to find people from twitter who've opened mastodon accounts. Several alums from here are already on mastodon, so that's a good starting place.
If it matters even a little which instance you pick, I haven't yet seen any sign of how. (I picked one based in Germany: it was open when I looked and has decent anti-Nazi rules.)
48: IIUC, Marc Andreesen is one of the venture backers of post.news. That's enough to warn me off.
One of the greatest Unfogged comments ever was in response to a thread very like this one:
A THOUSAND CURSES ON THAT WIZARD. WHAT HAS BEEN SEEN CANNOT BE UNSEEN.
Posted by: OPINIONATED TIME-TRAVELING COMMENTER FROM 2003
OT but this https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/14/china-says-spread-of-covid-impossible-to-track-as-infections-soar-in-beijing
has landed with a remarkably small splash. China has simply turned off pretty much all of its anti-COVID measures (and a lot of its COVID tracking measures) at once. Most of their (huge) elderly population is either unvaccinated or has had one dose of a not-very-effective vaccine.
They haven't started on the horse de-worming medication yet?
It's probably going to be a rough winter all over, but the covid poops are still really low here so I'm going to live in denial until after Christmas.
52: I thought China was still imposing draconian city-wide lockdowns?
55: not any more, it seems. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/11/economists-hail-end-to-zero-covid-in-china-but-huge-human-toll-is-feared
There might be some localised lockdowns continuing: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-63855508
China's National Health Commissioned announced a swathe of other new freedoms on Wednesday. They said:
Lateral flow tests would replace PCR tests in most scenarios where a result is needed, although PCRs are still needed for schools, hospitals and nursing homes
Lockdowns would continue but should only apply to more targeted areas - for example, certain buildings, units or floors as opposed to whole neighbourhoods or cities being shut down
Areas identified as "high-risk" should come out of lockdown in five days if no new cases are found. Several cities in China have endured months-long lockdowns. even with only a handful of cases
Schools can remain open with student attendance if there's no wider campus outbreak
Even assuming they fudge the figures more than we do, the covid deaths per capita are very low in China compared to the U.S. or U.K.
I guess I need to start washing my hands again.
Even assuming they fudge the figures more than we do, the covid deaths per capita are very low in China compared to the U.S. or U.K.
Well, they've been doing draconian city-wide lockdowns.
Also, they are probably lying about their death figures to a much greater degree than you think. They lie a lot, about all kinds of things, and so you shouldn't take anything they say about anything seriously, even as a starting point which you correct for fudging.
The official mortality from COVID in China is 0.367 per 100,000. Estimated excess deaths over the same period could be anything from 0.63 per 100k to 180 per 100k according to this model https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates
Estimated mortality from this outbreak - the one happening right now - is at least 680,000, and that assumes ICUs are not overcome.
(Another interesting fact: publicly reported UK deaths from COVID are greater than total excess mortality over the same period. This doesn't mean the model's wrong - just that other causes produced less mortality than normal during the COVID years. That isn't what you would see if COVID had indeed brought the health care system close to collapse like everyone said. You'd see high excess mortality from non-COVID causes if that was the case.)
180 per 100k is way below the U.S. (330 per 100k).
Yes, and another 680,000 deaths would equate to another 50 per 100k. And that's a best-case scenario, assuming that all the people who need an ICU bed can get one. China has only 60,000 intensive care beds (4.3 per 100k).
I'm just still amazed that the U.S. managed to avoid the huge death tolls of places that got hit early (e.g. Italy, Belgium) and produce effective vaccines, but still has a death rate up there with the counties that are much poorer.
The US wasn't that far behind Italy through the first year of the pandemic and its deaths per million are roughly the same as Italy's. https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths
Even assuming they fudge the figures more than we do
Has Mr. Davies taught us nothing? Fibbers' forecasts!
Halford pissed him off and we've been lacking since.
But we're well above places like Canada or Germany or all of Scandinavia.
I've been following the Taiwan numbers, which probably weren't fudged before they lifted restrictions around February or March, and are probably still pretty accurate now, and they went from fewer than 1000 deaths for the entire pandemic to almost 15,000 now. Still far lower than most of the world in aggregate but case numbers have never really gone below 10,000 positives per day there. I don't know if their testing statistics gathering captures home testing better than others.
Taiwan seems to have done better preparations than China, so I'd expect things to get pretty bad for quite a while in China.
Do they want us to send Ron DeSantis?
67: what are vaccination rates like in Taiwan? Are there boosters mRNA. Everything I've read says the inactivated vaccines are probably fine as an initial prime, but you need your booster to be an mRNA.
65:
No way, dude. He was arrogant and mean and I'm glad he's gone.
69: 80% vaccinated mostly with mRNA (some AstraZeneca), 50% boosted.
They do have a problem like China in that vaccination rates are lowest among the elderly. 70% among over 75s compared to 90% for 18-30.
Our local data (from our Sewershed) claims that we had an end of November peak and are coming back down. I don't know if I believe them, but it is interesting to check out whenever I'm reminded that the data is out there.
https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/COVID-19/CalSuWers-Dashboard.aspx
I have not done the comparison but I have the impression that older Taiwanese and Chinese Americans have higher vaccination rates than similarly aged people still in Taiwan and China. At any rate, it's always dangerous to generalize from one's own family but my relatives in the US had no hesitation around vaccines. Not sure about family abroad.
My non-Chinese relatives who we lost touch with at the beginning of what looked like a journey into the Tea Party and environs*, could have gone full antivax by now but who knows.
* The last Christmas card I remember seeing made a point of saying "Merry Christmas" because, despite Obama, "this is still America, isn't it?"
75.3: So, now they are in concentration camps, I assume.
Long and furious essay about how badly the US vaccination effort was run, from the guy behind VaccinateCA.
https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-story-of-vaccinateca/
I cannot emphasise enough how completely opposite this account is to my own experience of working right in the middle of the effort to vaccinate SE England, which was, I think, the single least fucked-up organisational enterprise in which I have ever been involved in my life.
Starting from a nationalized health system had to have been a significant organizational advantage there.
That article seemed a little (to put it mildly) overstated about blaming vaccine administration delays on equity considerations -- he spends a lot of fulminating about how awful it was that there were rules trying to ensure that money didn't get you priority for a shot, but when he's talking about the actual problems his organization (which sounds terrific and very useful) overcame, it was all disorganization rather than anything concrete about equity rules leading to waste.
Overall, looking back at winter and spring 2021, getting a vaccine was a chaotic and frustrating feeling period, but it was actually pretty quick for most people. A better organized system would have, I think, made people much happier because they wouldn't have been miserably phoning pharmacies for weeks, but I don't know that the visible chaos actually slowed down getting shots into arms by much.
The shots here were readily available. You just had to drive two hours out of the city or into Ohio. Someone decided that rural people were in danger of being under vaccinated and rural people didn't care, so that's where the available shots were.
80.2: but this is exactly what the article is talking about. If you're rich or well connected or used to dealing with bureaucracy, you were fine, and you probably thought everyone else was fine too.
I'm sure things could have been done better, but I'm not really eager to jump down anyone's throat about it when the big problem is pretty clearly that after Trump lost and the coup failed and Biden started to have high popularity, the vaccination program was deliberately sandbagged.
But it wasn't an issue with bureaucracy here. More of people coordinating vastly overestimating how much of the population can use the internet.
By some time in the summer (and before Delta hit!) it really was fine for everyone. Just go to literally any pharmacy any time, no bureaucracy needed. The chaos was bad, but genuinely not that long.
The basic issue here is that States are very bad. Having 50 different sets of rules is very confusing. Plus, generally speaking, States are worse at doing things than the federal government is.
I, by contrast, got the franchise just in time for Obama's Senate race and therefore have a coveted perfect record of picking the loser in every election he was ever in.
...Is this guy implicitly saying that he voted for Alan Keyes, John McCain, and Mitt Romney? Even if he thinks of himself as young and stupid in 2004, Keyes is quite a place to be coming from. He only got 27% statewide.
Yeah, voting for Alan Keyes is pretty much disqualifying for me to listen to anything someone says.
He's not even that bad compared to Oz.
82: No, it's not what the article is talking about. The article is complaining about the efforts to increase vaccine equity by giving preference to people in a bad position to navigate bureaucracy. The advantage that bureaucratically competent well-off people have in getting any kind of treatment is baked into our horrible health care system; the equity efforts he's bitching about didn't successfully override that completely, but they didn't make it worse or lead to a lot of wasted vaccine as far as I can tell.
And at least in NY, the chaos was over by May. As a healthy 49-year-old, I was in the last or next to last group for eligibility, and by the time I was eligible I just made an appointment without having to scramble for it.
And I don't want to badmouth this guy -- it does sound as if his thing was very beneficial in smoothing out some of the chaos. I just think he's looking at chaos caused by our messy decentralized healthcare system and blaming it on equity efforts.
So many shots were begging for arms here that I was fully vaccinated before I was eligible to be vaccinated. Except that I probably was eligible on the grounds of having gained enough weight during covid. But I didn't know until later.
Of course delays of a month did have terrible consequences. My friend who died of covid caught it during exactly this period (probably would have survived if he lived in the US instead of Canada, because the US was still controlling vaccine supply). But from a birds-eye view, people not getting vaccinated fast enough during spring of 2021 is a very small part of the covid picture. Covid rates in the US were low at the time, and within a few months it was easy to get vaccinated.
The whining about equity is annoying, but, as noted, par for the course for a Keyes voter. That said, the states/counties might have done better at the stage of the thing when the vaccine was for 75 year olds and up. By the time it got to me, 60+ with HBP, that is, early March, the systems were working fine here.
It's not really fair to compare the US effort to the UK one. I expect the NHS (and perhaps other UK agencies as well?) have like a database of people with ages and addresses. The US has absolutely nothing like this.
Well, unfair. They did better because they had a fundamentally better system.
87 Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That's crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.
96: I just went back to the original of that and found a John-the-Baptist version of "forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages":
I don't care how good your investment advisor is, he can spend three hours reviewing mutual funds, as soon as he says "And of course, we can put your money into the Easter Bunny's Egg Upgrades", he is out of --
My garage is cold and full of crap.
85: It was so weird here, because NY was way ahead of us. MA actually has a very robust vaccine distribution system run by the state with a lot of input from towns, and they were completely shut out of the process - initially in favor of hospital systems who only wanted to vaccinate *their* patients and then big private sites.
There's a big flu shot infrastructure which was dumped.
My former town used to be working class but now has a lot of professionals, including a fair number of doctors - so there was high vaccine interest did a fantastic job with the 12-18 year olds. They new that pediatric offices were going to be overwhelmed, so they had 2 Saturday clinics (4 days total) at the high school, and they got like 90% of the kids that way across all income levels. The town had wanted to do COVID clinics but was completely shut out by the Baker administration.
94 Not exactly. In the US, for people 65 and older -- and that's a lot of who we're talking about wrt early vaccine rollout -- we have a comprehensive single payer system, with ages and addresses in a big database.
89: more importantly, he's complaining that all the arguing about priority *generated* bureaucratic systems that themselves discriminated against people who struggle to navigate bureaucracy or who lack the connections to avoid it through string-pulling. The point is the classic one about universal provision being easier to administer and more egalitarian than means-testing, really, and I think it's interesting that had it been stated in those terms everyone here would be happily nodding along.
I was a little surprised that when he talks about queuing theory he didn't mention one of the most important results from it, which is that although switching between queues is better than not permitting switching, having only one input queue feeding multiple counters is better still and, IIRC, the dominant strategy if it's possible at all. After all, that's effectively what they did - create a big single queue that distributed people to vaccine locations as an overlay on the multiqueue setup.
(I discussed the experience of trying to get someone who's 80+ a vaccine through France's nicey-nice choicey choicey website on Twitter at the time; the whole thing brought it back very well. It was poles apart from the UK's, which could hardly have been more efficient.)
also this reminded me of that time the vaccine centre gave me a card to return to their poet in residence: https://twitter.com/yorksranter/status/1391404241089175564
102.1: yes, exactly. I thought he was making that point pretty clearly. The system tried to introduce equity, as well as prioritising a lot of groups of supposedly essential workers who weren't really essential or at elevated risk, like teachers. It didn't actually achieve either equity or optimal minimisation of mortality. Or at least that's his impression. He may of course be wrong - I'll defer on that one to people with deeper knowledge of the Californian public health system.
And at least in NY, the chaos was over by May.
He also makes the point (as in 92) that the cost of delay is one dead person per 10,000 person-days of delay. If the chaos delayed everyone in NY state getting their vaccine by just one day, it killed over a thousand people.
And of course it goes without saying that anyone who said "it would be better to destroy vaccine unused than to deliver it in disagreement with the approved priority list" was a monster.
But he has absolutely no specifics about equity efforts increasing confusion or delay for the people they're intended to serve. Whenever he gets concrete about what's making the system confusing, it's about the large number of private providers -- all the pharmacies, who had the supply but didn't have an incentive to get it into arms. That's not on the equity efforts, but that's what his organization was directly overcoming -- that's where he has stories about what his people were doing.
When he's talking about doses going to waste because of the equity efforts, even two years later, he's talking in generalities. He doesn't have either anecdotes (we were on the phone with a CVS with dozens of shots going bad, and they insisted the rules require that they spoil rather than going to patients) or statistics (which someone has probably looked into over the last two years). I'm not saying that equity efforts didn't lead to any waste, but this article doesn't make me think they led to much.
(The specific gripe about prioritizing teachers seems a little unrelated. As I recall it, the point of prioritizing teachers wasn't that they _were_ working in person already, is was that once they were vaccinated they _could_ safely work in person again without spreading to children. This didn't end up working out meaningfully, but that's 20/20 hindsight, not a problem with prioritizing groups in general.)
I have an impressionistic sense that the equity efforts did increase chaos and difficulty, during the chaotic period, for comfortable connected people, in the interests of decreasing it for less connected people. E.g., my eighty-year-old mother lives in a giant upper-middle-class housing project with a whole lot of old (well-off, comfortable) people. There wasn't a vaccine site there early (or at least not one I could find for her). Mom got hers at a site in a much poorer neighborhood. But she didn't have any problem finding it because she's well-off and comfortable and has bureaucratically competent family.
If you weren't concerned with equity at all, you might have put a site in Mom's project, and made her life easier. But she's got the resources to overcome a little difficulty. The old woman who I don't know who doesn't have a lawyer daughter to look at websites for her had an easier time to make it to the site in her neighborhood, and that's plausibly more important.
Tl:dr -- I think some of what the equity efforts did is spread the difficulty of getting treatment to the kind of person who usually doesn't experience it. That's going to be a big difference in the amount of complaining we heard without an actual net increase in difficulty population-wide.
I didn't think your mother lived in California.
No, New York. I am guessing that systems were broadly similar.
If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
Anyway, the most practical example he gives is a link to the form you needed to fill in to prove you were a senior citizen in NY - some 51 steps, wanting documents uploaded.
He doesn't actually -- he links to a tweet that links to a deleted tweet from January 10. I am trying to remember what I had to fill out for Mom, and that doesn't sound right, unless it got to 51 steps by counting First Name as one, Last Name as two, and Month, Day, and Year of birth as three four and five.
But also, what is that meant to show? He's complaining about equity efforts, but I don't think he's complaining about the rule prioritizing elderly people, right? So if that form was onerous, the issue with it isn't the rule it was intended to enforce, but that the form was badly designed. Absolutely there were all sorts of bureaucratically incompetent things going on, but that's not establishing that the efforts to prioritize groups equitably were causing the incompetence.
This is the kind of argument that I most love kibitzing on.
It would be interesting to know how much delay there was early on -- what locations had vaccine on site and capacity to give shots but no patients to give the shots to -- and then get a systematic sense of why. The story he's telling implies but doesn't quite say that there was significant delay of that type, and that if eligibility requirements had been dropped (dropped completely? Healthy 30-year-olds in line in January with sick old people? He doesn't say that would have been a good idea, which means there would still have been some kind of eligibility system) the delay would have significantly lessened.
But I don't get a sense that he has systematic knowledge of either half of that question.
There was so much variation in the vaccine roll-out. I should read the actual article, but I was in CA and at the time living with my parents so I could handle transportation and shopping while my dad was going through treatments for various cancers. My parents have "good" insurance via their (former) employer and retirement plan. But their provider is a huge health provider (Kaiser) and it had a different vaccine schedule from other providers, I think because of how the supply chain was managed.
There was a month, maybe more, when people with other insurers were getting vaccinated but Kaiser hadn't started yet. But when they got their own supply set up, they contacted my parents directly when appointments opened up and the sign up process was pretty quick.* Presumably because they were already in the system, so they only had to choose a time and location.
The Wayback Machine imperfectly preserved that tweet, but I found an article on the same subject.