MIAMI – After a week and a half leaving voice messages, writing emails and checking hospital websites, Harvey Rogers hopes he and his wife will be on a waiting list somewhere for a Covid-19 vaccine.
But the 75-year-old lawyer and resident of Pinecrest, an upscale neighborhood in Miami-Dade County, is unsure, since no one answered.
Rogers, who is diabetic and has high blood pressure, said it was frustrating.
“You feel like the government is not telling the truth,” said Rogers, adding that if state and federal governments were more open about when and where the vaccine would be available, there would be less “feeling of anxiety and being left out of the loop. . “
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In the two weeks since the Florida governor said the Covid-19 vaccine would be available to residents 65 and older, the vaccination registration process has been inconsistent across all counties, causing chaos, confusion and disappointment among the elderly population and their relatives.
The registration process was disparate and inconsistent: the sites crashed; the hospital’s telephone lines are congested; and fraud convinced people to pay for non-existent vaccination vacancies. In some places, the elderly camped overnight hoping to get a vaccine.
Florida, with a population of over 21 million, had the third highest Covid-19 case count in the United States in the past 7 days, just after California and Texas. It ranks sixth in deaths.
Exacerbating anxiety among the elderly, Florida last week announced the first case of the most contagious coronavirus strain, known as B.1.1.7, which was first discovered in the UK.
With that in mind, vaccinating many Florida senior citizens has become a race against the clock.
Part of the confusion is that the state has never developed a consistent strategy for its 67 counties to implement a vaccination program. While in some counties vaccines were allocated to public hospitals for distribution, others rely on the health department to prepare vaccines through the Eventbrite ticket app.
Although several counties have successfully used Eventbrite to schedule appointments, this has led to scams in others. In Port Richey, north of Tampa, some of the people who showed up at a Covid-19 vaccination clinic in the past few days thinking they had appointments found that their names were not in the books, said Melissa Watts, a spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Cheers.
Although vaccines are free, “people also said they were charged a fee to register,” Watts said by email. “After investigating further, we realized that there was a fake Eventbrite account being used to trick people into taking their money.”
It was not immediately clear how many people were affected, but health officials said they were referring complaints to local and state authorities for possible investigation. Two counties, Pasco and Pinellas, issued warnings to the public.
“Someone created a FAKE Eventbrite account to register for the COVID-19 vaccination. You should NOT be charged to register. Registration is FREE, ”said counties in identical tweets.
An Eventbrite spokesman said the company is “actively exploring how our platform can better support the effort to increase access to vaccines”, but has warned users to verify the legitimacy of all pages.
“We recommend that anyone who signs up for any event related to COVID-19 check and forward questions to employees of the local health service,” said the spokesman.
Some counties said that Eventbrite worked well for residents because it is easy to use. In Seminole County, people used Eventbrite to get 2,500 vaccination appointments 30 minutes after the live broadcast on Tuesday morning, said Andy Wontor, a county spokesman. People who signed up for county emergency text messages receive a text message with a link when appointments are available.
In Daytona Beach and Lee County, southwest Florida, thousands of elderly people camped overnight in long lines after county health departments announced they would distribute vaccines on a first-come, first-served basis.
In Miami-Dade, the state’s most populous county with the highest number of Covid-19 infections, Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach was the only entity that administered vaccines to the public until Tuesday. Miami-Dade is in fourth place in the country in confirmed cases, according to John Hopkins University and Medicine.
Mount Sinai was flooded with phone calls and has scheduled about 1,000 consultations a day, according to the CEO and president of the hospital, Steven Sonenreich.
“There is a huge demand to be vaccinated,” said Sonenreich.
Some hospitals and health departments have been criticized for demanding that appointments be made exclusively online, because some seniors don’t know much about the internet and may have problems using a computer or smartphone.
“We take all aspects of this into account when trying to make things as simple as possible,” said Sonenreich.
Miami’s public hospital, Jackson Health System, launched an online platform Tuesday morning to schedule vaccines. It aired at least two hours earlier than the hospital had announced, and in less than two hours, its 12,000 vacancies were filled, making many people angry that they were unable to make an appointment. A hospital spokesman said they would continue to open up vacancies as more vaccines became available.
Broward County, with the second highest number of Covid-19 cases in the state, launched a registration site for its drive-through vaccination system last week, but crashed hours after it went live due to high demand. The site was taken down for maintenance. Shortly after the relaunch on Monday morning, the county health department announced that its 26,465 vacancies had been filled.
But on Tuesday, the county reported another problem. “Due to a scheduling failure, more appointments were scheduled than could be attended to in one day,” he said in a tweet, announcing that some people had to reschedule.
Broward Health, the county’s public hospital, also faced technical problems with its hotline due to the volume of calls. They announced the next day that they were full until February.
Governor Ron DeSantis gave two press conferences on Monday, in Central Florida and Miami, and urged hospitals to vaccinate people as soon as possible and to operate seven days a week.
He said that hospitals have infrastructure and staff to vaccinate people quickly. He also warned that “hospitals that do not do a good job of delivering the vaccine will have their allocations transferred to hospitals that are doing a good job of delivering the vaccine.”
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The state’s Department of Emergency Management is working with the Department of Health to identify state-run Covid-19 test sites that can be converted into vaccination sites. The number of open sites will depend on the number of vaccines the state receives weekly.
The state is also identifying places of worship in underserved communities where vaccines can be administered.
DeSantis said the state expects to get 50% more vaccines in January than in December. At the moment, 80% of the vaccine doses have already been distributed to hospitals.
“I’m not going to say that there were no problems, but I think that overall, the distribution was probably better than what would be reasonably expected,” said DeSantis.
Carmen Sesin reported from Miami. David Ingram reported from San Francisco.