The electronic system for booking COVID-19 vaccinations in the Portland area reached its boiling point this week – not only for thousands of embittered elderly people who have tried for hours unsuccessfully to schedule appointments on a slow-moving website, but also for state leaders who eventually took notice.
On Friday, a day after residents in the area made 400,000 attempts to book just 3,800 appointments, Patrick Allen, director of the Oregon Health Authority, announced a major change.
Elderly people who want to plan appointments at the Oregon Convention Center in Northeast Portland apparently now have to register their names with the state. The state will send a list of suitable names to the operators of the mass clinic for conference centers, and the entrepreneurs will then contact residents when it is their turn for a vaccination.
“So you do not have to click three hours to click,” Allen said.
But many remain unclear about how the system will work, including the apparent design as a random lottery. Vaccine operators did not respond to questions about the new process at The Oregonian / OregonLive on Friday and were not at the news conference on Friday when government officials announced the change.
Officials said the switching of appointment arrangements would not be affected.
The new appointment process does not apply to people with mobility problems who are looking at the Portland International Airport slide. They will still have to compete online or telephonically if appointments are released on Mondays and Thursdays at 9am.
Allen said he looked at the online traffic congestion twice a week when the two mass clinics in Portland area made appointments. The problems immediately started appearing on February 8, the first day that seniors 80 and older fought for appointments – and only continued the following week when residents aged 75 and older were also eligible.
Allen said this week’s mess – when 70-year-olds and older were scurrying around – drove him into action. The change comes just before 215,000 unvaccinated Oregonians aged 65 to 69 are eligible for first doses next Monday.
“We went through the first two weeks with a lot of traffic jams (s), but this week was just really, really extreme,” Allen said.
The clinic operators – which include Legacy Health, Oregon Health & Science University, Kaiser Permanente and Providence Health & Services – said earlier this week problems identified on Monday would be rectified. But by Thursday, they had apparently conceded defeat, while the Oregon Health Authority separately acknowledged problems with its own website but claimed it was not related to an increase in web traffic.
Allen’s support for setting up a register – or, as he puts it, an ‘invitation system’, is in stark contrast to his position days before the start of the elderly earlier this month. Allen assumed that admitting up to 768,000 elderly people over the course of three weeks, when there was not nearly enough vaccine to meet the demand, would create ‘chaos’.
“Next week, many older adults will inevitably express frustration,” he told reporters at the time. ‘Next week, you do not have to look hard to see people experiencing confusion. We will fall short. ”
Under the new plan, Oregonians will need to register an appointment with the Oregon Convention Center at getvaccinated.oregon.gov next week and click on the blue “Start” box. They can also call 211 or 866-698-6155 to register.
The clinics did not respond to questions asked by The Oregonian / OregonLive about how soon they will book appointments for competent seniors. They also did not answer questions about whether seniors would get estimates of how long they would have to wait and whether they would be told their place in the queue.
But Allen said he estimates that by the end of March, all seniors, educators and people in phase 1a, which largely includes health workers, would receive first doses if they wanted to. This is due to larger vaccines expected from the federal government.
The vaccination staff also did not answer a question about the method that will be used – the first time, the first time or the oldest, which will be used to perform appointments.
However, Allen said that the names will be chosen at random and that older seniors will not be prioritized over younger seniors.
“If we prioritize, we will no longer qualify people who are younger and we will not do that,” he said.
Allen acknowledged that there will be more challenges in the short term, saying seniors should be “frustrated and unhappy” the next week or two.
“But the landscape is changing dramatically for the better,” he said, “in mid-March.”
Oregon plans to expand the vaccine admission on March 29 to include people aged 45 to 64 with underlying health conditions, plus some groups of people, including farm workers and those who are homeless.
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– Aimee Green; [email protected]; @o_aimee