Clark County residents continue to struggle with the online system to make COVID-19 vaccination appointments at the Clark County Events Center at Fairgrounds in Ridgefield.
On Sunday afternoon, a new batch of consultations was made available online, but dozens of residents said they were either expelled from the consultation portal or that the site crashed, according to emails and calls The Columbian received, as well as a briefing on Monday presented by Clark County Public Health.
The forum, broadcast on Facebook, was organized to help answer residents’ questions about the allocation of vaccines and where to get vaccinated, but questions remain regarding questions related to the consultation portal.
The mass vaccination site on the fair grounds is administered by the Washington State Department of Health. Safeway / Alberstons has administered the vaccine at the fairgrounds, along with the US National Guard.
Clark County Public Health is not involved on the fair site or the nomination portal.
Lauren Jenks, who represented the Department of Health at the forum, said she knew the site crashed for the first time, but she was unaware of the most recent flaw.
“This is super frustrating,” said Jenks.
Jill McGinnis, director of communications and public relations at Safeway / Albertsons, said that her pharmacy team was not aware of flaws or flaws in the appointment portal, but acknowledged that the site had heavy traffic as soon as consultations became available.
Safeway / Albertsons does not operate the portal. McGinnis said it is run by a third-party vendor called Kordinator. McGinnis said a team of Safeway / Albertsons pharmacies will contact Kordinator to inform him of the problems.
She said that Safeway / Albertsons has no plans to stop vaccination soon and emphasized that patience will be the key, as the number of people eligible for vaccination is now far greater than the supply of available vaccine.
Other planned vaccination sites
Although Public Health is not involved at the site near Ridgefield, she continues to work with an incident management team to prepare the county’s vaccination infrastructure to increase vaccine delivery.
The county plans to have several large-scale vaccination sites, as well as mobile vaccination clinics that can vaccinate people in adult households and also larger essential workplaces, such as food processing plants.
At the moment, it is difficult to implement these options due to the limited supply of vaccines. Last week, most of the county’s vaccines went to the fairgrounds. In total, 3,060 vaccines were administered on the fair grounds last week, easily exceeding the state’s goal of 500 vaccines per day.
There are factors that limit the county’s ability to administer the vaccine at this time. Vaccine supplies are still far less than the number of people eligible for the vaccine, according to Clark County Deputy Health Director Dr. Steven Krager.
“There is not enough vaccine for everyone now,” said Krager. “We are managing as fast as we can, but we just don’t have enough. I hope that will change in the future. “
For this week, the state has requested more than 358,000 doses of vaccine from the federal government, meaning that vaccination clinics in Washington, healthcare providers and pharmacies have considered they have the capacity to administer about 358,000 doses of vaccine this week.
The state, however, received only 107,000 doses of vaccine from the federal government, falling well short of that capacity. There are about 1.7 million Washington residents eligible for the vaccine now.
Clark County generally receives somewhere around 4,000 doses per week, but the county currently has 50,000 to 75,000 qualified people.
Vaccine supply is expected to increase at least slightly in the near future, which should help some. The state also expects the federal government to soon give notice of vaccine distribution in the next three weeks, instead of just next week. This will help medical providers to schedule appointments in the future.
Krager said more vaccination options will be available as more vaccine supplies arrive. Public health continues to match people with health professionals for vaccinations, but they are working on more than 20,000 pending vaccine orders.
According to state data, Clark County has administered more than 21,000 doses of vaccine so far.
“The good news is that we are preparing to be able to give a large amount of vaccine when it reaches the state,” said Jenks. “The bad news is that we had to disappoint a lot of people this week. “