||| 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.


WA COVID Vaccine Finder (covidwa.com)


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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