Riverside County will make another 10,000 appointments available from Saturday, Jan. 23 at 12:00 for the coronavirus vaccination clinics in Corona, Menifee, Beaumont and Indio, officials said Friday, Jan. 22.
The announcement comes amid ongoing public anger over an online appointment system. The province is switching websites to make the process smoother. However, the new website, which is now available and looks like the old website, will still rely on a state registration portal that leaves many residents furious after filling out online forms to find that there are no appointments.
The upcoming clinics are from Monday 25 January to Friday 29 January from 08:30 to 16:30 at the following locations:
- Corona High School, 1150 W. 10th St.
- Heritage High School, 26001 Briggs Road, Menifee
- San Gorgonio Middle School, 1591 Cherry Ave., Beaumont
- Indio Fairgrounds (Fullenwider Auditorium), Arabia 46350, Indio
The clinics on Mondays and Fridays are only open to the elderly.
Appointments for the clinics can be made at www.rivcoph.org/COVID-19-Vaccine from Saturday afternoon. Residents 65 and older who need help registering can call 211.
The vaccines are free, but those who receive them must register before arrival, have an appointment and provide proof of eligibility. Health insurance information will be requested but not required.
Riverside County currently offers vaccines to residents 65 and older; health care workers, law enforcement, first responders and food and agricultural workers. Brooke Federico, spokeswoman for the county, said Friday it is estimated that 700,000 provincial residents could be vaccinated, but the province received only 157,775 doses.
David Wert, spokesman, has worked in San Bernardino Province with operators of several sites that could serve as ‘super-sites’ for vaccinations. An announcement is scheduled for next week.
Since registering online vaccines last week, Riverside County has seen an overwhelming demand for very limited vaccine supplies. It took just 32 minutes on Thursday, January 21, before all 3,900 available appointments at six weekend clinics in Lake Elsinore, Perris and Indio were claimed.
After the appointment window opened, dr. Cameron Kaiser, provincial health official, tweeted that the province was “aware that some of our residents are having trouble accessing the vaccination appointments on our site … Keep your screen refreshed.”
We are aware that some of our residents are struggling to access the vaccinations on our site. Our IT team is handling the issue. Keep refreshing your screen. # RivCoNOW #RUHealth
– Dr. Cameron Kaiser (@RivCoDoc) 21 January 2021
On Thursday night, provincial officials said a technical problem appeared in the website code when the appointment window opened.
While the province promised a new website, officials said it would continue to join the state’s vaccination portal and that “if all appointments are discussed when the state’s registration is completed, users will not be able to find a time.”
Federico said in an email Friday that there are two main issues. First, the province’s website did not act “as required” on Thursday, she said, adding that the new website would fix it.
Second, the province’s website links to the state’s, which “requires residents to enter personal information before securing a period.” This led to many filling out online forms before learning: ‘there were no more times available,’ Federico said.
“The state system is simply not designed like Ticketmaster,” she said, adding that provincial officials had expressed concern at the state.
“If the province uses a different registration system, it would create a double and heavy process that would slow down the province’s efforts to administer as much vaccine as quickly as possible.”
In an email to Riverside County supervisors and other leaders, Temecula resident Julie Edmunds outlined her frustration at getting appointments for a colleague’s mother and her grandparents.
After using six computers, two phones and nine Internet browsers, Edmunds and her colleague got three appointments, only to see that they were canceled without rescheduling the event, Edmunds writes. She manages to get the first dose of vaccine with her husband because both work in a school district.
“These are vaccines (and not concert tickets or camping bookings,” Edmunds wrote.
‘… While I like to help every person I know make appointments, what happens to elderly people who have no one to help them? … How do we as a county rely on a system that excludes the people who need the vaccine the most from the nature of the matter? ‘
The province’s 211 number helps the elderly and people without internet access to make an appointment, although residents have complained that they could not make it.
In addition to the frustration, residents with two months of vaccination in two Albertsons in Riverside County canceled their appointments.
Limited staff forced the cancellation of appointments at the Murrieta Albertsons, company spokeswoman Melissa Hill wrote in an email, while a scheduling error led to the double booking of forced cancellations at the Albertsons in Corona.
In both cases, patients with canceled appointments will be housed in nearby Vons pharmacies next week, Hill said.
“These were isolated incidents, and we are working to accommodate as many of these patients as possible,” she said, adding that pharmacies in Albertsons and Vons will soon start making new appointments.
Riverside resident Gracie Torres spent the day Thursday trying to get appointments for her parents in Beaumont. After she and her siblings tried several times, the family got an appointment for their mother. But the site went on and the slots filled up so fast that Torres could not find one for her father.
Torres’ parents, Felipe and Graciela Rivera (70 and 65), survived the coronavirus attacks in the summer and the family did not want to take any chances.
“It’s frustrating because some of us haven’t seen our parents in almost a year,” Torres said. ‘I refuse to find out that they do not have access and that it will close again. When they announced the vaccinations, there was a glimmer of hope … but it was immediately taken away. I know (the province) is trying their best, but it’s incredibly frustrating. ”
Torres is also chairman of the board of the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, a non-profit group in Jurupa Valley that last week helped plan appointments for senior people in the interior and low-income families. None of their contacts have made appointments across the country so far, but will keep trying.
‘These are families of frontliners who are exposed, or older people without access to the internet. They do not know when appointments will open. How can they get through if everything collapses within minutes? ”
Richard Gainer, a 65-year-old Corona resident who called 211 on Thursday, was delayed for an hour while searching for appointments for himself and his wife – only to see that the slots were full.
He compares his experience to tickets to a Paul McCartney concert decades ago.
“I got a phone call and was able to get the tickets after 10 minutes – but I found out that his concert was sold out within 14 minutes,” Gainer said. ‘If I did not get those tickets, I would have gone through them. But this is a very different situation. People do it now because they want to live. ”