12 ms·

Suspension of the 15-minute wait for vaccination with mRNA vaccine for Covid-19

jjgreen 5y ago
For the second dose, as I walked out of the clinic an old-boy volunteer approached me: "Excuse me, which vaccine did you have?", "Astra-Zeneca" I replied. "Oh, OK then, we asking all of the people who have the other vaccines to wait in this tent for 15 minutes, there have been some cases of fainting ...", he leaned a bit closer, "... mostly women."
- mnd999 5y ago
  Your point is some of the volunteers are clueless and sexist? This article states the 15 min wait is about anaphylaxis, not fainting.
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    Or maybe it's... gasp a fake story on the internet?
  - jjgreen 5y ago
    He probably was a bit sexist in the way that old people can be, not necessarily malicious about it. There wasn't really a point, I just found it funny.
    - aaron695 5y ago
      It was a funny story. It's factually true more women faint. So he's certainly more correct than people who claim such things are sexist, or worse gender is a construct so this is impossible to measure, like this study that just goes off on a tangent to what is gender, because this gets you more university karma I guess than doing science - Understanding vasovagal syncope: a role for sex and gender doi:10.1007/s10286-020-00689-y (Vasovagal syncope is the common cause of fainting after a vaccine) The difference between men and women is not high enough to normally be anecdotally different though ~ 40:60 Perhaps men are leaving to faint off site?
    - piker 5y ago
      Agreed. I laughed. A worthy anecdote.
- yohann305 5y ago
  My brother did faint. Before he fainted I asked him are you ok? And he started replying incoherent words, that’s when I knew something was wrong. I was quick enough to go hold him as he was dropping towards the floor like a dead weight. Also you have to understand I had no clue if the guy was fainting or dying on the spot Ps: feel free to downvote cause this comment isn’t bringing any value, though it brings value to me as I’m venting off my heroic act..
  - chinathrow 5y ago
    You did great catching him. Always try to catch someone falling. A friend became briefly unconscious once and fell while another friend didn't react fast enough to hold him. The result of hitting asphalt hard was bleeding in the brain the size of a fist and 5 days in hospital care with hearing troubles for weeks. Edit: spelling.
    - jatone 5y ago
      don't try to catch, try to cushion the fall. trying to catch can lead to both of you being injured. esp when there is a large size differential
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    From now on, your brother should tell the doctor/nurse this whenever receiving a vaccination or other injection. They will ask him to lie down, and wait 15 minutes (regardless of this new rule).
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  I always had problem with injections. First time i almost fainted, asked them to lie down and wait. Next time i asked them to do the injection lying down BTW this is not a side effect of the specific vaccine, lots of people have fear of needles like that (Though i must say these vaccines feel like a sizeable chunk).
  - emerged 5y ago
    I seem to have that issue with the dentist while they’re injecting into the gums or whatever. But shots in the arm don’t bother me at all. Something about the inability to see whats going on, I just imagine the dentist panicking but trying not to let me know while the spit vacuum is draining my blood.
- pbaka 5y ago
  Because of the last two words or the fainting ?
- mlvljr 5y ago
  ..he said, and then immediately collapsed himself.
Havoc 5y ago
Not quite convinced by the rationale given. All that happened was people loitering & browsing on their phones a bit before buggering off. Removing that isn't going to tangibly speed up the roll-out of vaccines. The only NHS staff present last time in that area was someone handing out "I've been vaccinated" stickers
- Smaug123 5y ago
  My second dose was in Guy's, and the waiting area was at full capacity. (I would have quite happily gone to sit immediately outside the tent, but that was forbidden.) My third dose was in a community hall, with about the same number of vaccinators but 2x the available seating area, and throughput appeared massive by comparison. I think they must indeed have been limiting throughput at Guy's to avoid saturating the waiting area.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  Currently there's an input limit because of this "buffer" (how full the waiting room is allowed to be), when I got my first dose 6 months ago there was a long line outside of the vaccination center (not in the UK), and people showing up at 5:20 for a 5:30 appointment was told to wait (the first limitation was probably only having x bookable appointments per time slot). The healthcare workers were going as fast as they can though, so I guess that's the real bottleneck. I guess without the waiting area they can add more vaccination booths, but geez, that sounds stressful for the workers, imagine having a person every ~2 minutes for extended periods of time. Which makes me think I should move my booster appointment to the morning...
  - Havoc 5y ago
    >imagine having a person every ~2 minutes for extended periods of time. For my 1s dose I was at a walk in that had announced a lower age range than rest of London and the entire twittersphere showed up as a result. The docs must have been at <15 seconds each. Basically conveyor belt of people barely breaking their stride while walking past. They were still going at 19h00. Wild. Though to be fair lots of volunteers on both before & after dealing with the logistics so that docs just did the needle part. Definitely not sustainable pace especially if you expecting to do the same next day, but was impressive display of possible throughput
comice 5y ago
Had my booster in the UK yesterday and thought that sitting in a room with a bunch of other people for 15 minutes was surely an infection risk itself! They let us leave after 5 minutes anyway.
- criddell 5y ago
  Had my booster (Moderna) at a grocery store pharmacy in Texas and they never mentioned any need to wait. I was in and out in just a few minutes.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    That sounds like a liability for said pharmacy. Got mine at the Kaiser yesterday and they had signs up all over the place.
- beardyw 5y ago
  Agreed. We waited the full 15 minutes on trust, but having driven there I would have preferred to sit in the car. If people are planning to drive it might be an idea to do that anyway - no delay to others, and avoiding getting into difficulty while driving?
guhcampos 5y ago
In Brazil we had a few tens of millions of people vaccinated with the Pfizer/Biontech vaccine, no 15 minute wait required. I haven't heard of any anaphylaxis case, which is anecdotal of course but I believe anti-vaxxers would have made a big deal out of it. So all-in-all killing this 15 minute wait might not be very effective to quicken vaccination, but it should not be harmful at all either, so no biggie really.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- zerocount 5y ago
  No biggie unless you're the one adversely affected.
- flawzz 5y ago
  Hey guh, I’m from Brazil too. I took both Pfizer shots already and I had to wait 15 minutes only after getting the second dose. I really appreciate the hard work of our health professionals, but I think most people didn’t wait after the jab because we are not following the vaccination protocol as we should.
  - adnmcq999 5y ago
    We don’t want the jab because of general distrust- which is, if not reasonable, at least understandable.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      They said wait, not want.
- headmelted 5y ago
  It definitely will speed things along from personal experience, if only because the waiting area afterwards seemed to be the bottleneck slowing things down. Anecdotal I know, but it really was a case of waiting around for people to leave before they could continue.
addicted 5y ago
Looks like another victim of partygate. Boris Johnson’s need to distract from his scandals led him to announce targets without discussing with the NHS and actual providers so now they need to make changes to accommodate his political requirements.
- mercy_dude 5y ago
  Not a fan of Borris Johnson but I will give credit where it’s due. UK government has done far better job than in delivering boosters and vaccines. No need to have derangement syndrome, I think more people we can get boosters the better off we are. His scandals and affairs are different issues.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    Bojo wasn't out there vaccinating people himself. That's the NHS that's been hauling ass. It's kind of their raison d'être. The political arm of the UK government's job ends at procurement.
    - mercy_dude 5y ago
      OK but what’s your point then? His government says 15min wait isn’t necessary- you say he is trying to deflect his own personal scandals. His government supposedly does a decent job - you say it’s not his credit. At some point these derangement has to stop. Like I said I don’t like him or condone his scandals. But this has nothing to do with the original post saying 15min wait isn’t necessary. This is what happens when you watch 24/7 opinion media outlets that want to tie seemingly different things to satisfy their narratives.
      - arcticbull 5y ago
        > His government says 15min wait isn’t necessary. I agree with that. > ... you say he is trying to deflect his own personal scandals. I didn't say that. > His government supposedly does a decent job - you say it’s not his credit. All I'm saying is that the credit is due to the NHS for executing on the vaccination campaign.
heisenbit 5y ago
The reasoning sounds scary i.e. Omicron doubling every 2-3days…
- lolc 5y ago
  It's doubling at the expense of the delta variant. Total cases are not doubling.
  - an9n 5y ago
    We should not trust in any way any UK government statistics any longer - it's crystal clear they are lying through their teeth.
    - KaiserPro 5y ago
      The politicians, yes, probably. The dashboard (https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/)) is pretty trust worthy. Lying is simple, and even then Government routinely fucks it up. I doubt they have the capacity to convincingly forge the data required to generate that website.
    - mattrighetti 5y ago
      If you don't trust statistics you have nothing left to trust in, doesn't look like a smart move.
      - posix_me_less 5y ago
        Not true. You can trust your own observations and thought process results and can make your own small statistics from anecdotes coming from your acquaintances.
  - 323 5y ago
    There is no reason to think the doubling will immediately stop once delta is pushed out.
  - pfdietz 5y ago
VLM 5y ago
Comparing the USA rates of hospitalization by age group as reported by statista to the anaphylaxis rates in the link, the "best" vax outcomes are with very old and comorbidity people, so it would have been wiser to separate by age. Or maybe rephrased the outcome for vax'd 85+ and generally speaking, old fat and sick, patients is so vastly better that anaphylaxis among that group would be a rounding error, being vax'd for those people is like 800+ times better than unvax'd. On the other hand, for thin healthy kids the hospitalization rate for covid for a couple months is about the same as the anaphylaxis rate in that age group, so vax'ing healthy young people won't reduce hospitalization rates overall, instead of having like 1 per 100K kids in the hospital for covid you'd have about 1 per 100K kids in the hospital for anaphylaxis, so for them the risk is vastly reduced from no improvement to some improvement if they watch them for 15 minutes. Therefore the best policy would be some sort of age based triage. Not-old, thin, healthy are more likely to end up with anaphylaxis hospitalization than covid hospitalization, so put them in observation for 15 mins to minimize the damage from vaccination. As for the old, fat, and sick, the rate of anaphylaxis hospitalization can seems to be about one thousandth the rate of covid hospitalization so proportionately observing them for 15 minutes won't save as many as simply vax'ing more of them would save, so push them thru the assembly line and don't bother with the 15 minutes. I don't know the ratio of old/fat/sick to healthy in the UK. Perhaps, similar to some areas of the USA, may as well simply make one policy assuming everyone is old/fat/sick or some combination. In that situation the UK plan might make sense. Like in the USA having a vax clinic at a nursing home or Walmart or similar, just assume everyone attending the vax clinic is old/fat/sick.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  > On the other hand, for thin healthy kids the hospitalization rate for covid for a couple months is about the same as the anaphylaxis rate in that age group, so vax'ing healthy young people won't reduce hospitalization rates overall. I don't think this follows. Part of the benefit of vaccination is that it prevents spread and so vaccinating young and healthy people helps insulate unwell, old and immunocompromised folks. > Not-old, thin, healthy are more likely to end up with anaphylaxis hospitalization than covid hospitalization, so put them in observation for 15 mins to minimize the damage from vaccination. The goal here is to speed up the rate of vaccination by eliminating the bottleneck of keeping folks around. Only 28% of folks in the UK are obese so, and taking into account other factors and comoribidities, let's say 50% of folks needed to wait and 50% were free to go. Operationalizing a giant waiting line for thin people to hang out in as they wait on folks with a 15 minute timer, while fat people with comorbidies were free to duck in and out and get back to their lives feels pretty unworkable.
sys_64738 5y ago
After the Moderna booster I walked right out although they required a waiting period where I am.
- snarf21 5y ago
  Globally, we have done a poor job preparing people for the shots. I only had symptoms after my first jab but I immediately ate lunch and started hydrating heavily. Nothing at all for my last two, maybe some very mild fatigue and injection site soreness. I talked to the RN who gave me my booster and her anecdote after doing this for months was that the only people who get woozy are those who hadn't eaten or drank that day yet. Everyone should be told to eat 30 minutes before your shot and to hydrate excessively before and after your shot. Treat it like a cold and feed it. Your body will have an immune response after the shot, give it the fluids and immediate blood sugar to do so and get on with your day.
headmelted 5y ago
This is what panic looks like. Given the virus is by most recent evidence assumed to be airborne (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sage-98-minutes-coronavirus-covid-19-response-7-december-2021/sage-98-minutes-coronavirus-covid-19-response-7-december-2021 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sage-98-minutes-c...) it wouldn’t take much at this stage to cause the system to flood with cases. If you’ve been vaccinated are you going to be fine? Probably. If you haven’t? Shrug. We’ll find out in the next couple of weeks I guess. The government knows that they now need another round of lockdowns but don’t have enough support among the public to do it, hence the desperate push for this as the next best thing. The queues to get jabs in my neck of the woods have been massive, so maybe that’s a good sign. Not that it was fun standing in a big queue with that many strangers for hours. I’d prefer to have an actual Omicron vaccine but hopefully winging it with this one works.
- an9n 5y ago
  Interesting to ponder what would have happened without the full-spectrum WE'RE ALL DOOMED! DOOMED I TELL YA! propaganda push. The first 'pandemic' in history that we have to be reminded all the time exists, else it would disappear.
  - JulianMorrison 5y ago
    It wouldn't disappear, it would just appear out of the blue and kill you. Proper reaction to a disease requires evasive action before it infects you.
    - nradov 5y ago
      In the long run you won't evade infection. All of us should expect to eventually get infected. Fortunately this disease has a <1% fatality rate. Vaccination and other treatments cut the risk even further. https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immunity-not-possible-astrazeneca-developer-2021-8?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
    - joshuahughes 5y ago
antirez 5y ago
In Italy the 15 wait is done in an additional room where people are just "asked" to stay at the end of the process. Then they can go away before the wait, if the want. I can't see how a wait at the end of the process could reduce throughput by 23%. This looks like the next UK mismanagement of the pandemic.
- goodcanadian 5y ago
  In the UK, and my experience was similar. I did my 15 minute wait sitting in my car, and it was only recommended because I was driving. When my wife did hers, I drove her, so we didn't bother waiting around (and no one asked us to). I really don't know where this is coming from.
  - anon1385 5y ago
    I think experience will differ a lot based on when you were vaccinated. Earlier on (Feb/March last year) it sounds like the waiting time wasn't being strictly enforced - you were advised to wait especially if you were driving but there wasn't really any administration of it. That was the experience my parents had and I heard similar from other people vaccinated at that time. I got vaccinated in the summer at one of the larger vaccination centres and they were being more strict about it. After getting vaccinated they gave you a card with a time written on it which was when you were supposed to leave (although both times it was only 10 mins not 15). There was a dedicated 'room' with chairs in it and a clock and a nurse watching over things. After your time was up you left the card on the chair. Nobody was physically forcing you to stay but there was an obvious expectation that you would and I didn't see anybody walk straight out either time (out of a sample of 60+ people that I overlapped with).
    - goodcanadian 5y ago
      My experience was as described in both May and July. If anything, I think they said less about it on the second dose. It might vary depending on location . . .
- barnabee 5y ago
an9n 5y ago
'My vaccine only works if you take yours too!'
gladinovax 5y ago
i understand your frustration Still not getting the vaccine.
Arubis 5y ago
How on earth does this speed vaccination rates? The 15-minute wait is after the jab, and so presents zero bandwidth constraints on the actual vaccination process. It’s just a bunch of people sitting quietly in a room requiring almost no attention, then leaving. I don’t have a huge objection to the decision itself; if folks have found that GBS is really low risk, sure, tell people they can stay or go at their leisure. But the justification here is so transparently ridiculous that it makes me wonder what the real reason is.
- barnabee 5y ago
  Addressed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29565981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29565981 Vaccination is much quicker than 15 minutes... if there isn't space in the room for the next person to sit quietly, you can't jab them.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  Rooms have capacity limits, especially with distancing requirements. You can do probably fifteen shots in that fifteen minutes, so if you've got a big queue it certainly might let you get through it faster.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wonderwonder 5y ago
Got the booster the other day and no 15 minute wait time. This is in the US. I did ask them to aspirate the shot before pushing it and they seemed surprised but did it without issue and were very nice about it. Have read a few articles questioning whether accidental intravenous injections are causing myopericarditis. Figured having them aspirate would just be a good thing. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34406358/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34406358/
toyg 5y ago
It should be said that the minister clarified on the radio this morning that this is an optional measure for facilities where accounting for the 15min wait would slow down operations upstream. If there is no such restriction (because, say, the carpark is big or the waiting hall is large, etc), then they can keep people waiting. I had my third shot in a parish centre, and the post-jab waiting room was a church hall. It was largely empty, there was plenty of space, I don't think they were even monitoring the numbers coming in; I wouldn't expect the likes of them to remove the wait.
Anthony-G 5y ago
To avoid a recurrence of last year where there was a massive spike of hospitalisations (due to Delta), the Irish health service is keen to get as many people their booster shot before Christmas. It looks like we’ll be doing the same in Ireland: https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2021/1215/1266843-covid-christmas/ https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2021/1215/1266843-covid-... Last winter, the number of cases started growing from November onwards – even before newer variants such as Delta became a concern – but the government was under huge public and media pressure not to introduce further restrictions to control the spread. They went against the recommendations of the National Public Health Emergency Team (as they’re entitled to do so) and allowed Christmas and pre-Christmas to proceed without restrictions. Predictably, the case numbers grew exponentially and they had to bring in another lock-down a couple of days after Christmas. Unfortunately, it was too late and in the New Year, case numbers surged far higher and quicker than they had in 2020, ICU beds filled to capacity and it took many months of restrictions to restore Covid-19 incidence to a manageable level. Almost everyone is hoping that the current set of approved vaccines will work effectively enough against Omicron that we’ll avoid a repeat of last year. While I haven’t (yet) “done my own research”, our National Immunisation Advisory Committee is fairly conservative so I’m not overly concerned if they recommend removing the 15-minute observation period to increase throughput and allow more citizens to get a booster shot sooner. As software developers might say, “the perfect is the enemy of the good”.

For the second dose, as I walked out of the clinic an old-boy volunteer approached me: "Excuse me, which vaccine did you have?", "Astra-Zeneca" I replied. "Oh, OK then, we asking all of the people who have the other vaccines to wait in this tent for 15 minutes, there have been some cases of fainting ...", he leaned a bit closer, "... mostly women."

mnd999 5y ago
Your point is some of the volunteers are clueless and sexist? This article states the 15 min wait is about anaphylaxis, not fainting.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  Or maybe it's... gasp a fake story on the internet?
- jjgreen 5y ago
  He probably was a bit sexist in the way that old people can be, not necessarily malicious about it. There wasn't really a point, I just found it funny.
  - aaron695 5y ago
    It was a funny story. It's factually true more women faint. So he's certainly more correct than people who claim such things are sexist, or worse gender is a construct so this is impossible to measure, like this study that just goes off on a tangent to what is gender, because this gets you more university karma I guess than doing science - Understanding vasovagal syncope: a role for sex and gender doi:10.1007/s10286-020-00689-y (Vasovagal syncope is the common cause of fainting after a vaccine) The difference between men and women is not high enough to normally be anecdotally different though ~ 40:60 Perhaps men are leaving to faint off site?
  - piker 5y ago
    Agreed. I laughed. A worthy anecdote.
yohann305 5y ago
My brother did faint. Before he fainted I asked him are you ok? And he started replying incoherent words, that’s when I knew something was wrong. I was quick enough to go hold him as he was dropping towards the floor like a dead weight. Also you have to understand I had no clue if the guy was fainting or dying on the spot Ps: feel free to downvote cause this comment isn’t bringing any value, though it brings value to me as I’m venting off my heroic act..
- chinathrow 5y ago
  You did great catching him. Always try to catch someone falling. A friend became briefly unconscious once and fell while another friend didn't react fast enough to hold him. The result of hitting asphalt hard was bleeding in the brain the size of a fist and 5 days in hospital care with hearing troubles for weeks. Edit: spelling.
  - jatone 5y ago
    don't try to catch, try to cushion the fall. trying to catch can lead to both of you being injured. esp when there is a large size differential
- Symbiote 5y ago
  From now on, your brother should tell the doctor/nurse this whenever receiving a vaccination or other injection. They will ask him to lie down, and wait 15 minutes (regardless of this new rule).
cblconfederate 5y ago
I always had problem with injections. First time i almost fainted, asked them to lie down and wait. Next time i asked them to do the injection lying down BTW this is not a side effect of the specific vaccine, lots of people have fear of needles like that (Though i must say these vaccines feel like a sizeable chunk).
- emerged 5y ago
  I seem to have that issue with the dentist while they’re injecting into the gums or whatever. But shots in the arm don’t bother me at all. Something about the inability to see whats going on, I just imagine the dentist panicking but trying not to let me know while the spit vacuum is draining my blood.
pbaka 5y ago
Because of the last two words or the fainting ?
mlvljr 5y ago
..he said, and then immediately collapsed himself.

Havoc 5y ago

Not quite convinced by the rationale given. All that happened was people loitering & browsing on their phones a bit before buggering off. Removing that isn't going to tangibly speed up the roll-out of vaccines. The only NHS staff present last time in that area was someone handing out "I've been vaccinated" stickers

Smaug123 5y ago
My second dose was in Guy's, and the waiting area was at full capacity. (I would have quite happily gone to sit immediately outside the tent, but that was forbidden.) My third dose was in a community hall, with about the same number of vaccinators but 2x the available seating area, and throughput appeared massive by comparison. I think they must indeed have been limiting throughput at Guy's to avoid saturating the waiting area.
bellyfullofbac 5y ago
Currently there's an input limit because of this "buffer" (how full the waiting room is allowed to be), when I got my first dose 6 months ago there was a long line outside of the vaccination center (not in the UK), and people showing up at 5:20 for a 5:30 appointment was told to wait (the first limitation was probably only having x bookable appointments per time slot). The healthcare workers were going as fast as they can though, so I guess that's the real bottleneck. I guess without the waiting area they can add more vaccination booths, but geez, that sounds stressful for the workers, imagine having a person every ~2 minutes for extended periods of time. Which makes me think I should move my booster appointment to the morning...
- Havoc 5y ago
  >imagine having a person every ~2 minutes for extended periods of time. For my 1s dose I was at a walk in that had announced a lower age range than rest of London and the entire twittersphere showed up as a result. The docs must have been at <15 seconds each. Basically conveyor belt of people barely breaking their stride while walking past. They were still going at 19h00. Wild. Though to be fair lots of volunteers on both before & after dealing with the logistics so that docs just did the needle part. Definitely not sustainable pace especially if you expecting to do the same next day, but was impressive display of possible throughput

comice 5y ago

Had my booster in the UK yesterday and thought that sitting in a room with a bunch of other people for 15 minutes was surely an infection risk itself! They let us leave after 5 minutes anyway.

criddell 5y ago
Had my booster (Moderna) at a grocery store pharmacy in Texas and they never mentioned any need to wait. I was in and out in just a few minutes.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  That sounds like a liability for said pharmacy. Got mine at the Kaiser yesterday and they had signs up all over the place.
beardyw 5y ago
Agreed. We waited the full 15 minutes on trust, but having driven there I would have preferred to sit in the car. If people are planning to drive it might be an idea to do that anyway - no delay to others, and avoiding getting into difficulty while driving?

guhcampos 5y ago

In Brazil we had a few tens of millions of people vaccinated with the Pfizer/Biontech vaccine, no 15 minute wait required. I haven't heard of any anaphylaxis case, which is anecdotal of course but I believe anti-vaxxers would have made a big deal out of it. So all-in-all killing this 15 minute wait might not be very effective to quicken vaccination, but it should not be harmful at all either, so no biggie really.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
zerocount 5y ago
No biggie unless you're the one adversely affected.
flawzz 5y ago
Hey guh, I’m from Brazil too. I took both Pfizer shots already and I had to wait 15 minutes only after getting the second dose. I really appreciate the hard work of our health professionals, but I think most people didn’t wait after the jab because we are not following the vaccination protocol as we should.
- adnmcq999 5y ago
  We don’t want the jab because of general distrust- which is, if not reasonable, at least understandable.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    They said wait, not want.
headmelted 5y ago
It definitely will speed things along from personal experience, if only because the waiting area afterwards seemed to be the bottleneck slowing things down. Anecdotal I know, but it really was a case of waiting around for people to leave before they could continue.

addicted 5y ago

Looks like another victim of partygate. Boris Johnson’s need to distract from his scandals led him to announce targets without discussing with the NHS and actual providers so now they need to make changes to accommodate his political requirements.

mercy_dude 5y ago
Not a fan of Borris Johnson but I will give credit where it’s due. UK government has done far better job than in delivering boosters and vaccines. No need to have derangement syndrome, I think more people we can get boosters the better off we are. His scandals and affairs are different issues.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Bojo wasn't out there vaccinating people himself. That's the NHS that's been hauling ass. It's kind of their raison d'être. The political arm of the UK government's job ends at procurement.
  - mercy_dude 5y ago
    OK but what’s your point then? His government says 15min wait isn’t necessary- you say he is trying to deflect his own personal scandals. His government supposedly does a decent job - you say it’s not his credit. At some point these derangement has to stop. Like I said I don’t like him or condone his scandals. But this has nothing to do with the original post saying 15min wait isn’t necessary. This is what happens when you watch 24/7 opinion media outlets that want to tie seemingly different things to satisfy their narratives.
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      > His government says 15min wait isn’t necessary. I agree with that. > ... you say he is trying to deflect his own personal scandals. I didn't say that. > His government supposedly does a decent job - you say it’s not his credit. All I'm saying is that the credit is due to the NHS for executing on the vaccination campaign.

heisenbit 5y ago

The reasoning sounds scary i.e. Omicron doubling every 2-3days…

lolc 5y ago
It's doubling at the expense of the delta variant. Total cases are not doubling.
- an9n 5y ago
  We should not trust in any way any UK government statistics any longer - it's crystal clear they are lying through their teeth.
  - KaiserPro 5y ago
    The politicians, yes, probably. The dashboard (https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/)) is pretty trust worthy. Lying is simple, and even then Government routinely fucks it up. I doubt they have the capacity to convincingly forge the data required to generate that website.
  - mattrighetti 5y ago
    If you don't trust statistics you have nothing left to trust in, doesn't look like a smart move.
    - posix_me_less 5y ago
      Not true. You can trust your own observations and thought process results and can make your own small statistics from anecdotes coming from your acquaintances.
- 323 5y ago
  There is no reason to think the doubling will immediately stop once delta is pushed out.
- pfdietz 5y ago

VLM 5y ago

Comparing the USA rates of hospitalization by age group as reported by statista to the anaphylaxis rates in the link, the "best" vax outcomes are with very old and comorbidity people, so it would have been wiser to separate by age. Or maybe rephrased the outcome for vax'd 85+ and generally speaking, old fat and sick, patients is so vastly better that anaphylaxis among that group would be a rounding error, being vax'd for those people is like 800+ times better than unvax'd. On the other hand, for thin healthy kids the hospitalization rate for covid for a couple months is about the same as the anaphylaxis rate in that age group, so vax'ing healthy young people won't reduce hospitalization rates overall, instead of having like 1 per 100K kids in the hospital for covid you'd have about 1 per 100K kids in the hospital for anaphylaxis, so for them the risk is vastly reduced from no improvement to some improvement if they watch them for 15 minutes. Therefore the best policy would be some sort of age based triage. Not-old, thin, healthy are more likely to end up with anaphylaxis hospitalization than covid hospitalization, so put them in observation for 15 mins to minimize the damage from vaccination. As for the old, fat, and sick, the rate of anaphylaxis hospitalization can seems to be about one thousandth the rate of covid hospitalization so proportionately observing them for 15 minutes won't save as many as simply vax'ing more of them would save, so push them thru the assembly line and don't bother with the 15 minutes. I don't know the ratio of old/fat/sick to healthy in the UK. Perhaps, similar to some areas of the USA, may as well simply make one policy assuming everyone is old/fat/sick or some combination. In that situation the UK plan might make sense. Like in the USA having a vax clinic at a nursing home or Walmart or similar, just assume everyone attending the vax clinic is old/fat/sick.

arcticbull 5y ago
> On the other hand, for thin healthy kids the hospitalization rate for covid for a couple months is about the same as the anaphylaxis rate in that age group, so vax'ing healthy young people won't reduce hospitalization rates overall. I don't think this follows. Part of the benefit of vaccination is that it prevents spread and so vaccinating young and healthy people helps insulate unwell, old and immunocompromised folks. > Not-old, thin, healthy are more likely to end up with anaphylaxis hospitalization than covid hospitalization, so put them in observation for 15 mins to minimize the damage from vaccination. The goal here is to speed up the rate of vaccination by eliminating the bottleneck of keeping folks around. Only 28% of folks in the UK are obese so, and taking into account other factors and comoribidities, let's say 50% of folks needed to wait and 50% were free to go. Operationalizing a giant waiting line for thin people to hang out in as they wait on folks with a 15 minute timer, while fat people with comorbidies were free to duck in and out and get back to their lives feels pretty unworkable.

sys_64738 5y ago

After the Moderna booster I walked right out although they required a waiting period where I am.

snarf21 5y ago
Globally, we have done a poor job preparing people for the shots. I only had symptoms after my first jab but I immediately ate lunch and started hydrating heavily. Nothing at all for my last two, maybe some very mild fatigue and injection site soreness. I talked to the RN who gave me my booster and her anecdote after doing this for months was that the only people who get woozy are those who hadn't eaten or drank that day yet. Everyone should be told to eat 30 minutes before your shot and to hydrate excessively before and after your shot. Treat it like a cold and feed it. Your body will have an immune response after the shot, give it the fluids and immediate blood sugar to do so and get on with your day.

headmelted 5y ago

This is what panic looks like. Given the virus is by most recent evidence assumed to be airborne (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sage-98-minutes-coronavirus-covid-19-response-7-december-2021/sage-98-minutes-coronavirus-covid-19-response-7-december-2021 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sage-98-minutes-c...) it wouldn’t take much at this stage to cause the system to flood with cases. If you’ve been vaccinated are you going to be fine? Probably. If you haven’t? Shrug. We’ll find out in the next couple of weeks I guess. The government knows that they now need another round of lockdowns but don’t have enough support among the public to do it, hence the desperate push for this as the next best thing. The queues to get jabs in my neck of the woods have been massive, so maybe that’s a good sign. Not that it was fun standing in a big queue with that many strangers for hours. I’d prefer to have an actual Omicron vaccine but hopefully winging it with this one works.

an9n 5y ago
Interesting to ponder what would have happened without the full-spectrum WE'RE ALL DOOMED! DOOMED I TELL YA! propaganda push. The first 'pandemic' in history that we have to be reminded all the time exists, else it would disappear.
- JulianMorrison 5y ago
  It wouldn't disappear, it would just appear out of the blue and kill you. Proper reaction to a disease requires evasive action before it infects you.
  - nradov 5y ago
    In the long run you won't evade infection. All of us should expect to eventually get infected. Fortunately this disease has a <1% fatality rate. Vaccination and other treatments cut the risk even further. https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immunity-not-possible-astrazeneca-developer-2021-8?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
  - joshuahughes 5y ago

antirez 5y ago

In Italy the 15 wait is done in an additional room where people are just "asked" to stay at the end of the process. Then they can go away before the wait, if the want. I can't see how a wait at the end of the process could reduce throughput by 23%. This looks like the next UK mismanagement of the pandemic.

goodcanadian 5y ago
In the UK, and my experience was similar. I did my 15 minute wait sitting in my car, and it was only recommended because I was driving. When my wife did hers, I drove her, so we didn't bother waiting around (and no one asked us to). I really don't know where this is coming from.
- anon1385 5y ago
  I think experience will differ a lot based on when you were vaccinated. Earlier on (Feb/March last year) it sounds like the waiting time wasn't being strictly enforced - you were advised to wait especially if you were driving but there wasn't really any administration of it. That was the experience my parents had and I heard similar from other people vaccinated at that time. I got vaccinated in the summer at one of the larger vaccination centres and they were being more strict about it. After getting vaccinated they gave you a card with a time written on it which was when you were supposed to leave (although both times it was only 10 mins not 15). There was a dedicated 'room' with chairs in it and a clock and a nurse watching over things. After your time was up you left the card on the chair. Nobody was physically forcing you to stay but there was an obvious expectation that you would and I didn't see anybody walk straight out either time (out of a sample of 60+ people that I overlapped with).
  - goodcanadian 5y ago
    My experience was as described in both May and July. If anything, I think they said less about it on the second dose. It might vary depending on location . . .
barnabee 5y ago

an9n 5y ago

'My vaccine only works if you take yours too!'

gladinovax 5y ago

i understand your frustration Still not getting the vaccine.

Arubis 5y ago

How on earth does this speed vaccination rates? The 15-minute wait is after the jab, and so presents zero bandwidth constraints on the actual vaccination process. It’s just a bunch of people sitting quietly in a room requiring almost no attention, then leaving. I don’t have a huge objection to the decision itself; if folks have found that GBS is really low risk, sure, tell people they can stay or go at their leisure. But the justification here is so transparently ridiculous that it makes me wonder what the real reason is.

barnabee 5y ago
Addressed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29565981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29565981 Vaccination is much quicker than 15 minutes... if there isn't space in the room for the next person to sit quietly, you can't jab them.
ceejayoz 5y ago
Rooms have capacity limits, especially with distancing requirements. You can do probably fifteen shots in that fifteen minutes, so if you've got a big queue it certainly might let you get through it faster.

deleted 5y ago

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wonderwonder 5y ago

Got the booster the other day and no 15 minute wait time. This is in the US. I did ask them to aspirate the shot before pushing it and they seemed surprised but did it without issue and were very nice about it. Have read a few articles questioning whether accidental intravenous injections are causing myopericarditis. Figured having them aspirate would just be a good thing. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34406358/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34406358/

toyg 5y ago

It should be said that the minister clarified on the radio this morning that this is an optional measure for facilities where accounting for the 15min wait would slow down operations upstream. If there is no such restriction (because, say, the carpark is big or the waiting hall is large, etc), then they can keep people waiting. I had my third shot in a parish centre, and the post-jab waiting room was a church hall. It was largely empty, there was plenty of space, I don't think they were even monitoring the numbers coming in; I wouldn't expect the likes of them to remove the wait.

Anthony-G 5y ago

To avoid a recurrence of last year where there was a massive spike of hospitalisations (due to Delta), the Irish health service is keen to get as many people their booster shot before Christmas. It looks like we’ll be doing the same in Ireland: https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2021/1215/1266843-covid-christmas/ https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2021/1215/1266843-covid-... Last winter, the number of cases started growing from November onwards – even before newer variants such as Delta became a concern – but the government was under huge public and media pressure not to introduce further restrictions to control the spread. They went against the recommendations of the National Public Health Emergency Team (as they’re entitled to do so) and allowed Christmas and pre-Christmas to proceed without restrictions. Predictably, the case numbers grew exponentially and they had to bring in another lock-down a couple of days after Christmas. Unfortunately, it was too late and in the New Year, case numbers surged far higher and quicker than they had in 2020, ICU beds filled to capacity and it took many months of restrictions to restore Covid-19 incidence to a manageable level. Almost everyone is hoping that the current set of approved vaccines will work effectively enough against Omicron that we’ll avoid a repeat of last year. While I haven’t (yet) “done my own research”, our National Immunisation Advisory Committee is fairly conservative so I’m not overly concerned if they recommend removing the 15-minute observation period to increase throughput and allow more citizens to get a booster shot sooner. As software developers might say, “the perfect is the enemy of the good”.