Chai's Blog

Today, on the tenth day of the cur­rent lock­down, I got my first vac­ci­na­tion jab done! We just walked into the local vac­ci­na­tion cen­tre, and they have spaces!

My age group was­n’t eli­gi­ble to book until this week. When I tried to book my vac­ci­na­tion ear­li­er this week the lat­est slot I could book is six weeks away. After book­ing my slot, today, I got a mes­sage say­ing I can book the vac­cine. Clear­ly, some­thing is off with the book­ing sys­tem.

Despite book­ing for Octo­ber, we decid­ed to try walk­ing into one of the two vac­ci­na­tion cen­tres in the neigh­bour­hood. The clos­est cen­tre dis­played a sign that walk-ins are not allowed. So we drove past to the next one, and it turned out they had some spaces!

The rest of the process was smooth and effort­less. I am afraid of nee­dles, but I did not even real­ize they jabbed on my left arm! The staff were very pro­fes­sion­al, friend­ly, and nice.

Despite the great suc­cess we had with the Covid response in 2020, I must say as a coun­try we floun­dered on the vac­ci­na­tion pro­gram for what­ev­er rea­son. It took the dead­ly delta vari­ant to appear in our com­mu­ni­ty to expe­dite our vac­ci­na­tion pro­gram on a war-foot­ing. I feel like we dropped the ball some­where when we were Covid-free in the six months before the cur­rent lock­down: an exam­ple that past per­for­mance increas­es con­fi­dence more than abil­i­ty. We should have con­tin­ued the same 2020-lev­el of rigour into 2021 on both erad­i­cat­ing and vac­ci­na­tion fronts.

Any­how, I am glad to get my first jab done today and look­ing for­ward to book­ing the sec­ond jab in three weeks. Some clicks to com­mem­o­rate today: