||| FROM SEATTLE TIMES |||
That pretty much said it all, the other day, when a 90-year-old remarked in a Seattle Times story that the easy part of navigating our COVID-19 vaccine system was when she had to walk 6 miles through the snow to get the shot.
George Hu is only 52, but he can sympathize. When the former Microsoft developer tried to find appointments online for his 80-year-old in-laws, he was dumbfounded how primitive it all was.
“All tech people who see this setup are horrified,” Hu says.
That was my experience trying to nab a slot for my 91-year-old father. As everyone discovers, there isn’t one or a couple of places to hunt vaccine, but rather … hundreds, many with their own interfaces. I ran into one vaccine provider that was using Doodle for its vaccine appointment scheduling, another using Sign-Up Genius, another with a “don’t call us, we’ll text you back sometime” online form.
Rather than a global health emergency, it felt more like when the PTA is signing parents up for a bake sale.
“It’s whack-a-mole, except there are 300 holes,” Hu says. “And also you have no clue if the mole is ever going to pop up in any of them.”
Echoed Maureen O’Hara, a former Microsoft project manager turned vaccine hunter: “I realized at one point I had 30 tabs open on my computer, and still no appointment. I remember a lot of cuss words were involved.”
The obvious thought is: Shouldn’t there be an app for this? OpenTable manages to book one billion reservations a year at hundreds of thousands of restaurants. How hard would it be to adapt that to a system with 330 sites statewide?
Not that hard, it turns out.
“We had the basics of it up and running in a few days,” says Hu, who teaches computer science at South Seattle College.
Starting about 10 days ago, the mounting frustration prompted a team of four guerrilla techies, led by Hu, to set up a system of “screen scrapers,” robots that troll the 330 vaccine websites to search for available appointments. Hu said the inspiration was the way scalpers use bots to comb through sites like Ticketmaster, hustling cheap tickets.
READ FULL ARTICLE: www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/how-some-frustrated-covid-19-vaccine-hunters-are-trying-to-fix-a-broken-system
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I would use this site with a word of caution. I believe people have booked appointments at off island locations (Island Drug in Oak Harbor) only to get turned away when they got there because they were not an Island County resident. It was in the fine print that it was limited to Island County residents but was easily missed.
I’m the creator of the site and former Orcas resident. I was surprised to see an Orcas publication when I was searching to see who was covering our story. Yes, we can’t tell you the details for any given site. We rely upon the information provided by the DOH. Now, specifically about Island Drug, we actually reached out to them because they have posted availability for such a long period of time and we received a personal response that they are welcoming residents out of their county. They do have restrictions on 1st/2nd dose and you must pay attention on their page. I can’t speak to residents being turned away prior. Things change rapidly and it’s not hard to believe that early doses might have been reserved but with increasing supply things may have changed. I hope you’re all enjoying Orcas time.