I'm not a frequent poster here, and this is my first time using the whole multi-quote thing, so I apologize if I make this hard to follow... catching up on this thread.
My stupid question of the day. For anyone who has received the vaccine, which arm did you get it in? I am right handed and used to get the flu shot in my left arm, usually resulting in pain, tenderness, and some swelling in the injection area.
Not a stupid question! I received my vaccine in my dominant arm, as I always choose to do. I have some chronic shoulder/rib issues on my left side and figure I don't need extra pain in that arm, and I also know that I'll be moving my right arm much more, hopefully limiting how long the arm is sore post-vaccination.
My hospital is giving it to anyone who wants it no matter your job title. They have enough doses for all 8000 employees.
My hospital system is kind of doing that. I think that for people working off-hospital sites (like at corporate or from home), they are not receiving invitations to schedule at this time. But for departments working within the hospitals, they are inviting a certain percentage of departments at any given time. They don't want an entire department being vaccinated the same week to prevent everyone from calling out with fever after vaccination at the same time. Though they are saying that all departments are being invited, it seems there may be different percentages of departments receiving invitations at any given time, and I suspect that some departments are prioritized. That said, I do believe housekeeping is one of the prioritized departments.
I didn't quote the other posts regarding who gets it when, but wanted to point out that COVID exposure does happen in non-COVID units. I work in pediatric hematology/oncology- our patients are extremely high risk (believe it or not, some of our hematology patients are at highest risk even compared to our most immunocompromised oncology patients.) We do have children and parents who are diagnosed with COVID when in clinic or inpatient, having exposed our staff and potentially other patients (despite many measures in place to prevent this- a lot of this involves honesty and trust in correctly reporting symptoms and exposures.) We don't have full PPE (one surgical mask per day, no N95s.)
For IT, I can verify that some IT (not all) personnel are right there in the patient units. We have had COVID units built up and taken down and built up again, all needing IT support. IT has been on COVID units while patients are there, providing support for computer networks and other equipment. IT is in my non-COVID patient unit daily, not very far from patients at all. Not only do they take a risk coming into contact with patients, it's a risk to our patients to have these extra people in, but computer, network, printer, programming, etc. issues do arise. So I can understand why some IT personnel would be receiving vaccinations alongside other hospital departments.
My hospital has definitely had a few instances where there is an extra dose towards the end of a vaccination shift; they seem to be calling respiratory therapy (one of the highest risk departments, in my opinion) to see if anyone wants to come at that moment and then cancel their upcoming appointment.
There were some other quotes I missed... some have been asking if people who had side effects from dose one had COVID previously. As I reported earlier in this thread (and I'm not sure how much I updated!), I did experience fever, fatigue, and headache (questionable side effect since I often get headaches anyway.) As far as I know, I have not had COVID. I had negative antibodies at the end of May, and have had multiple negative COVID swabs (PCRs) throughout the past many months. I absolutely could have had an asymptomatic infection at some point, but was never diagnosed and never had symptoms.
, this will be quite the read for you -----
