weed, medical care (injection mentioned)
There are now *three* cannabis shops in easy walking distance of my home, and I have just purchased weed (Dragon OG, naturally) from the one I had not previously visited, which moved to this location fairly recently.
I also got a flu shot! Not at the weed shop, alas, but I feel like they should run some kind of cross-promotion between weed and flu shots because they are literally adjacent to a convenience care clinic (that I happen to prefer). So I went out, got mildly stabbed, bought weed, and walked home, and this seems like an entirely reasonable and normal errand run.
So take this as a reminder: get your flu shot! Even if you're fortunate enough to be able to continue to shelter-in-place through the COVID pandemic (because you don't need to leave your home for work), please get a flu shot anyway (if you aren't allergic) because we're going to have *two* pandemics at once (we've just gotten so used to the flu pandemic it's an annual tradition by now), and we should mitigate them as best we can - and we have better tools for fighting off flu than novel coronaviruses. (For now. It's probably going to be an annual flu/SARS-CoV combo shot in future years.)
re: medical care (injection mentioned)
@kistaro You get annual flu pandemics?
...
People can be allergic to flu shots?
re: medical care (injection mentioned)
Grocery-store immunization clinics are a strikingly effective public health tool. Going to a grocery store is less risky than going to a medical clinic (after all, medical facilities have a lot of traffic in sick people), administering flu shots can be done easily and safely by relatively inexperienced (and therefore relatively underpaid) nurse practitioners, and convenience matters - it's a lot harder to get people to go out of their way to get stabbed in the arm, but "you're already here, you should do the responsible thing for your health and for public health, just get in line and it's free with insurance or $20 without" is a much easier sell.
Fully-functional convenience care clinics are starting to become a normal feature of Wal-Mart, among other retail providers. Immunization programs are a much more limited product, but they also represent a much smaller investment so they have a great payoff for public health.
Uninsured people get more medical care when retail clinics are available: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22788953/
Presence of retail clinics increases cost of care by $14/patient/year, due to increased utilization: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26953299/
Mayo Clinic is of the view that this increased utilization is a good thing: https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2016.0936?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori%3Arid%3Acrossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub++0pubmed&
...and it turns out it reduces cost-of-care by $131 in the *next* year on reduced hospitalizations alone: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23725453/
Retail clinics have much higher patient satisfaction than conventional primary care clinics: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19796291/
As bad as American health care is, the unique problems it creates result in weird things like this that turn out to be, in retrospect, obviously good ideas (let's put cheap doctors for everyday stuff where people already are). It seems kind of weird to go to the grocery store to go to the doctor, but let's turn it around: people have to go to grocery stores anyway, and having a doctor there who charges $20 is a good way to push people over from "I'm not feeling unwell enough to justify the effort of talking to a doctor about it, only to be told to take ibuprofen and get over it" to "she's _right there_ and it's $20, I might as well ask".
re: medical care (injection mentioned)
Flu is always pandemic, it's always autumn or winter in one hemisphere or the other. Annual flu shots are because flu is already a pandemic, not to prevent pandemics; that ship sailed millennia ago.
The USA has a worse flu problem than other developed nations for the same reason it has worse health problems than other developed nations in general: very poor access to medical care, expensive medical care, very poor public understanding of epidemiology, etc. Fewer people get flu shots here because they cost money, which of course makes flu shots more important because it can spread more readily in the undervaccinated population.
re: medical care (injection mentioned)
@kistaro I guess I never hear about the flu being a "pandemic" down here. It's just a seasonal thing that you're encouraged to get shots for in autumn.
re: medical care (injection mentioned)
It's a contagious disease that has escaped political barriers and oceanic barriers, becoming widespread in worldwide populations. It's a pandemic - just a pandemic we've learned to live with.
SARS-family coronaviruses are very likely to be the same, long-term, and are likely to have the same results: annual vaccinations and cumulative apathy make it _mostly_ a non-issue as the disease becomes well-understood and normalized.
re: medical care (injection mentioned)
@Taylor @kistaro Yes on the first, it's absolutely a thing. (And I didn't know the second was a thing, despite living here.)