||| FROM BRENDAN COWAN for DEPARTMENT OF EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT |||
Some key information islanders should be aware of about the ongoing San Juan County Health & Community Services vaccination effort:
- Current eligibility for vaccine is limited to individuals in Phase 1a and Phase 1b Tier 1. This includes healthcare workers, first responders, those over 65, and those over 50 and caring for a grandchild or elder. Full details are available here.
- The next round of reservations for vaccine appointments in San Juan County will be made available on Friday, January 29 at 5 p.m.
- IMPORTANT: San Juan County has received 200 doses of vaccine from the State for distribution next week to individuals receiving their first shot. Demand will far exceed supply. Thank you for your patience.
- There is no waitlist. Many have thoughtfully suggested it as a good idea. Please keep in mind that:
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- Any waitlist would quickly exceed many thousands of individuals.
- There is no fixed schedule for timing or amount of future vaccine deliveries from the State to the County. It is literally week to week.
- Given that there is no way to know future appointment availability, there is no way to confirm schedule availability of those registered for a waitlist.
- As time goes on, many individuals will be immunized elsewhere and no longer need the vaccine.
Without an effective sophisticated nation or statewide online system that ensures privacy and manages appointment scheduling and waitlists, a phone call would be required to process each person on the waitlist. At this time, in the midst of the rollout effort, and continued work on case investigation, contact tracing, and other public health response efforts, neither personnel nor infrastructure are available to manage a waitlist of that size.
Please be patient folks. Thank you!
Just for the record, my husband and I were waiting with the registration site loaded and ready, and at 5:00 on the dot we hit the “book” button in order to get one of those rare vaccines. After much time watching a spinning wheel we were told that there are no vaccines available. AAAAARGH. I do understand that these vaccines come in small quantities, and that the DEM is doing their best. Thank you for your tireless work!
Ditto Elly Hoague. I had same experience. Appreciative and frustrated. Wondering how the lucky got through. Patience, patience….
Actually, Elly, we got the same message on our first tries, but tried again and again and finally got a few proffered slots on Friday afternoon, February 5. But by the time my partner had filled out the form and hit “Confirm Reservation,” they were no longer available. Gone presumably to other, faster, luckier islanders. Sigh.
Michael…Same experience for us. Both my wife and I started at exactly 5:00 and both got the exciting offer of 1:30 on Feb 5, but by the time we filled out the forms, our hopes were crushed by the final “not available” red banner. Very frustrating! Does anyone know how many doses were available?
Even recognizing that vaccine supplies are limited and distribution times unpredictable doesn’t excuse the lack of a workable wait list and appointment system. Most of us have email. I get both “live” and automated phone calls reminding me of appointments all the time. With a wait list, appointments could then be ordered by number even if the future date is uncertain. Defaults and cancellations would simply defer to the next candidate in line. Managing such a process would only require one clerical worker.
Without a list, how will the County know that all individuals within a given tier have been served before opening up the next tier? Equitable vaccine distribution is too important for a lottery. How many collective hours will Islanders have to spend playing the County sweepstakes trying to get an appointment? If HCS is not vaccinating on a regular basis due to lack of vaccines, it should use that time to develop a rational, equitable distribution system for future rounds.
I understand why a wait list is impractical and why the internet scrum is unfair. The part that really bothers me is that there are still health care workers in the 1A category who still have been unable to get vaccines or appointments. There doesn’t seem to be any mechanism to get them appointments other than just clicking the button and watching the wheel spin along with all the other thousands of now-eligible people in San Juan County.
This is just wrong.
This is a ridiculous and untenable scheduling nightmare. After spending a YEAR quarantining, masking and basically having life ‘on hold’, only to find that the county is using eBay bidding as a system to schedule appointments for a vaccination is the last straw. If I can be nagged by the UW medical system to have my damn cholesterol checked via automated mailing systems, then surely there is something better than the completely unfair and preposterous current system of allocating vaccines.
Blame VCITA, the business management app company that the County hired.VCITA’s website says, “Build a business you’re proud of.
Manage clients, appointments & payments from one single app.” Well, we’re NOT proud! FIRE THEM!!
But this doesn’t need to be rocket science either. We were all asked our age in the questionnaire. Just simply take a list of peoples ages in chronological order, start with the oldest and go down the line!
I agree with Dan. Take everyone who proves qualification and put them on the schedule in order of age. Most of us are home retired and available. Send an e-mail or call them to let them know their date and time. Have a group of volunteers waiting at the central vaccine spot to take a shot if there are some left over.
I’ve lived through several World Cups playing the same game to get tickets–it’s a longstanding joke. But for vaccines, it’s not funny.
The system the county is using to administer the scheduling of Covid-19 vaccinations is woefully inadequate. I won’t go into all the reasons why that is so, because most already reading this have unfortunately already experienced them.
However, I will give you insight into how it could be made better: What is needed is a very simple appointment scheduling/notification system. Now, how does that work?
This is the setup:
We’re the customer, with less than a dozen pieces of information that characterize us…. We fill that in on the web site form (name, age, date of birth, email address, phone number, etc.) This information determines the vaccination tier each customer is in, along with the date/time each registered, and contact information.
There’s only about 14,000 people in the county. Computers are very good at handling thousands of records…. That’s what they were designed to do.
The vaccination is the service, with about half a dozen pieces of information that define it (location, number of vaccinators, number of vaccinations, how long it takes to process a customer/administer a vaccination, a calendar of available dates/times, etc.) This information can be entered into the system and maintained based on forms filled in by the county.
Once again, computers are very good at handling records like this.
Then comes the part of the system that makes it all work, the brains of it:
The system is programmed to notify the customer when their info has been successfully stored, and looks at the customer info, and sorts it into vaccination tier, then registration date/time order.
It then looks at the service info to determine how many vaccinations can be given at a specific location, based on the limiting parameters of vaccinators, vaccinations, service time, available dates/times, etc.
It then assigns customers in the sorted order to available dates/times, filling them up in sequence, and notifying them via the customer contact info. The customer is asked to confirm their scheduled vaccination date/time within a specific (24/48/?) number of hours. If they do not confirm, their scheduled date/time is opened up for the next customer in the sorted order, and the original customer is notified that their appointment has been cancelled.
The customer’s record is updated when they confirm and when the dose is administered. 2nd dose appointments are inserted in the calendar at the same time as the first dose, and handled based on the communications/status as for the first dose.
Now, once again, computers are very good at looking at stored information and performing this processing. It is, as they say, “not rocket science”.
The above design is not totally complete, but contains most of the parameters for a system that would be much more functional than what’s currently available.
I believe an IT professional with current technical skills could setup and test a system based on the above design in 2 to 4 weeks.
Just my thoughts.
Micheal, those who managed to secure a vaccine appointment on Friday were luckier perhaps, but not necessarily faster. I had my tech savvy family on a total of 6 devices with fast typer’s and fiber at the ready attempting to win me a vaccine. We had the same experience. VCITA needs to lengthen the time for entering your info. And Thea, I also am trying to find out the mechanism for how a 1a caregiver friend who is over 70 can get his jab