Pete FreedmanAs Of March 29, Every Texan Over The Age Of 16 Can Register To Receive A COVID-19 Vaccine. So Please Sign Up Posthaste, OK? We Miss Y’All.
The Texas Department of State Health Services has officially dropped the restrictions: Starting Monday, March 29, every Texan over the age of 16 years old is now eligible to register for a COVID-19 vaccination.
Granted: People over the age of the 80 will still receive priority scheduling, and fewer vaccines are currently available than the number of Texans who are eligible to receive them, so signing up will by no means guarantee an immediate appointment — but, still, this is all very welcome news after such a deadly and grueling 12-month stretch.
At the time of this writing, 13.3 percent of Texans have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, and 25.3 percent have received the first of the two-dose variants. And now you can sign up, do your part and raise those percentages!
So, please: Sign up. Get vaccinated. Do it for us, if you somehow need a push!
SEE ALSO: 40 REASONS DALLASITES SHOULDN’T WORRY ABOUT THE VACCINE.
Listen: We need this. Like Dallas’ own Lisa Loeb before us, we miss y’all. We miss randomly running into y’all around the city. We miss literally bumping into y’all at shows. We miss just… living alongside y’all.
The sooner you get vaccinated, the sooner we can get back to that!
Not sure where to get vaccinated? The good news is that you have so many options — including various maps, dashboards and services that can point you in the right direction toward finding a vaccination site (public or private; the vaccine is free either way) near you. (There’s also this useful Dallas Morning News guide to vaccination sites, just in case the previous links don’t somehow cut it.)
We’re already all anti-bodied up after having gotten our one-and-done Johnson & Johnson shot through Dallas County at the “mega” vaccination site at Fair Park back on March 8, and can firsthand — plus anecdotally through friends — confirm that the long wait-times that plagued the site once upon a time have been mostly worked out. It’s been weeks since we heard of anyone needing more than two hours (max) to get in, get their shot and get out of the Fair Park drive-through set-up.
The scene at Fair Park’s Gate 2 entry for first doses (Gate 8 tends to be used for second doses) was pretty smooth on the day we visited, as this aerial footage courtesy of our friends at Panther City Air from that same morning shows.
Our trip in and out of Fair Park took less than 30 minutes total that day — including the 15-minute wait period after which you receive the shot and professionals make sure you don’t have some sort of negative immediate reaction to it.
The process itself was totally painful — although, full disclosure, the vaccination did absolutely kick our ass for a 36-or-so-hour period that kicked off about six hours after our inoculation. But that too passed, and it only really meant the vaccine was working, so we’d never been so happy to feel so bad.
Meanwhile, tons of others we know who’ve gotten the shot haven’t felt any side effects after receiving it at all, so who knows what your experience might be?
All we know is we’re hyped to see the light at the end of the tunnel — and we want you to go on and get signed up ASAP too so we all can emerge into the spotlight together.
The only way out is through.