STORY UPDATED 18:00: This story has been updated to reflect the actual increase in doses for the elderly at the Oregon Convention Center.
The Oregon Health Authority has announced that it will require three clinics to vaccinate at least 15,000 doses of COVID-19 per week for three weeks in senior clinics aged 65 and over in the provinces of Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas and Columbia.
It is unclear how large an increase is compared to overall vaccination doses currently allocated each week to the operators of clinics at the Oregon Convention Center and Portland International Airport. The state and local health care providers that run the mass vaccination centers did not answer questions about the numbers on Monday.
Officials also announced that they have made a significant change in the way seniors in Portland areas plan appointments at the conference center. Elderly people still have to register and wait to be randomly selected from the getvaccinated.oregon.gov registry. But once selected, seniors no longer have to wait for a call from an overloaded call center to schedule an appointment. Instead, they will send an individualized link via email that they can use to select available appointment times and book appointments on their own, government officials said.
The changes come after the state introduced its new lottery system last week. The conference center’s vaccination center booked only 1,950 new appointments through the system, with call center workers contacting Oregon residents and booking appointments manually.
“To improve this manual and time-intensive process, this new approach will now enable much faster (appointments) and higher volumes, which will be needed as the vaccine supply increases,” reads a news release on Monday.
While the Oregon Health Authority said in a news release that it was committed to allocating at least 15,000 doses to the operators of the Convention Center clinic, a state spokesman said the number could ‘include doses’ that go to the mass vaccination site at Portland International Airport. The clinics are jointly managed by Oregon Health & Science University, Legacy Health, Providence Health & Services and Kaiser Permanente.
The Health Authority described the proposed weekly 1,950 appointments at the conference center as a successful weekend launch. Some seniors said it took 48 hours to more than 72 hours for the call center to contact them. a live person at 211 to ask questions, or they have not received an email confirming their appointments.
Others were disappointed that they were not selected at all and said the process was too slow. Yet many were relieved that they did not have to compete for appointments online at a set time – and had to endure a sluggish website that sometimes froze or started, as in recent weeks.
The director of the health authority, Patrick Allen, said he expects 70% to 75% of the elderly to receive their first doses by the end of March. Currently, about 42% of Oregonians 65 and older have received at least one dose.
Healthcare providers in the Portland area have designated the conference center for vaccinations for the elderly without mobility problems. A visit to the conference center can, according to the providers, mean you have to stand or wait for one to two hours.
Elderly people with mobility issues are being asked to schedule appointments at the other massive vaccination room in the Portland area, the airport’s drive-through vaccination room – where many people are scheduled for shots fired in their cars on Saturday. To book an appointment there, seniors still have to go online on Mondays and Thursdays at 9am to get a vaccination time.
This Monday, as has been the case for the past few Mondays and Thursdays, the upcoming appointments at the airport were over within 10 to 15 minutes.
It is unclear what appointment registration system the state and local health care providers will use comes on March 29, when hundreds of thousands of Oregonians 45 years and older with underlying conditions – as well as homeless people and frontline workers such as agricultural workers. – eligible for vaccinations.
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– Aimee Green; [email protected]; @o_aimee