I’ve had my first vaccine in New York, and realised just how lucky we are

We weren’t expecting to get vaccinated until the end of summer but then the rollout went into overdrive and now we’ve had our first jabs – hopefully it won’t be long before I can see my parents again, writes Holly Baxter

Just a few short weeks ago, we were being told people in our age group would wait until the end of the summer for a jab (Getty)

On Monday afternoon, I was lucky enough to be able to attend a vaccine appointment in Rockaway Beach, Queens. The long-awaited jab was arrived at through much strife: when New York governor Andrew Cuomo announced that the state was going to open up appointments to all New Yorkers age 16 and over, my husband and I went into full “Glastonbury Festival ticket-buying” mode. We parked our laptops and phones beside each other, upgraded our internet connection and began setting alarms for 6am so we could try to nab the first appointments released for the day. Like pretty much everyone else in NYC, we also signed up to notifications from Turbovax, a website built by an enterprising local man that collates all the data on appointments and buzzes phones every time more jabs are dropped off in certain places. After a week of losing out on appointments by microseconds, E was woken by a Turbovax notification at 8am on a Sunday and jumped online. And all of a sudden, we were in.

Just a few short weeks ago, we were being told that people in our age group would probably wait until the end of the summer until we became eligible to receive this season’s most coveted accessory: a vaccinating shot against Covid-19. Then, after a speech by Joe Biden, hundreds of thousands of jabs appeared to descend upon New York. All of a sudden, we were told we’d all be vaccinated by May. With vaccine appointments just three weeks apart here – as opposed to the UK’s spacing of 12 – we’re now facing the possibility of being fully vaccinated at the same time as our parents in England.

It’s one small jab for a woman, you see, but one huge step towards me being able to see my family in the UK again