January 6th – Florida recently launched a policy of giving priority to vaccination for people over 65 years old.
However, due to the insufficient supply of vaccines, elderly people queue up all night to receive vaccination in many places.
According to the Associated Press on the 5th, some counties in Florida are vaccinated through appointment system, and some event management and ticketing websites are booked for vaccines, which is more operable for the elderly, but some counties have adopted first come, first-served management methods, and local officials temporarily opened the parking lot of the stadium.
More than 200 cars parked here overnight, and hundreds of elderly people camped in night temperatures as low as 4 degrees. “We brought blankets and pillows and we thought it was ok,” an elderly man, Mary Wilde told reporters.
As of 5 p.m. on the 5th, nearly 290,000 people in Florida have been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus, accounting for about 1.3 percent of the state’s population.
Steve Geller, mayor of Broward County, Florida, said that there is not enough vaccine doses to provide equal vaccination opportunities for 4.5 million people in the state, which also caused panic among the elderly.
Geller said he receives indiscriminate bombardment of emails and phone calls from older people who are dissatisfied with the distribution of vaccines.” Many older people are panicked, believing that the government has promised them to get a vaccine immediately, but the government has not done so.”
Nearly 1.4 million people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, with more than 22,000 deaths, and about 83% of deaths are over 65 years old, according to the state health department.
Florida has the highest proportion of the elderly population in the United States.
