The beleaguered campaign to vaccinate elderly people in Sonoma County against coronavirus plunged into even greater chaos on Monday, when the company that managed the immunization effort at a Rohnert Park clinic began canceling thousands of appointments, while not correcting one flaw in its website that incorrectly allowed people under the age of 75 to schedule 9,000 photo appointments.
The scheduling website, developed by a state contractor hired to run this county-specific clinic, continued to accept appointments on Tuesday from people aged 65 to 74 who are too young to qualify locally for the current round of vaccinations.
That’s even though the site has been on the air for at least a week and county officials said on Friday that 85% of the marked vaccine markings had to be canceled because they were for people under 75 and ineligible in the county to receive the vaccines. vaccines.
OptumServe has started to cancel all appointments made by people under 75 years old. In addition, he decided to cancel and reschedule all appointments for a second dose – including those scheduled by people aged 75 and over – because some did not schedule the necessary 21-day interval between vaccinations. In addition, many people received conflicting text messages about the status of their appointments.
The problems undermined the public’s faith in the county’s ability to run an unprecedented campaign to vaccinate the population of nearly 500,000 people against the coronavirus, while diminishing an effort to protect residents from an infectious disease that killed at least 265 people since it was detected here. last march. And the delay in completing consultations at the Rohnert Park Community Center forced the county to delay vaccinating teachers before a possible return to face-to-face classes.
Asked on Monday at a news conference who is ultimately responsible among county officials for the lack of communication with OptumServe and the rocky implantation of the Rohnert Park clinic, Lynda Hopkins, chairman of the county’s Board of Supervisors, said that ” the responsibility always ends with us “, but emphasized the difficult position of the county.
Hopkins was referring to the county’s determination to focus now on inoculating elderly people aged 75 and over, because this group of 36,000 residents accounts for 60% of virus-related deaths, although California Governor Gavin Newsom in mid-January has opened vaccination eligibility for anyone in the state for 65 years.
County officials hope to start vaccinating residents aged 65 to 74 in late February.
In the meantime, moving forward to expand the vaccination effort, the municipality will hold clinics in six different locations this week, which are also exclusively for residents aged 75 and over.
Dozens of exasperated readers of the Press Democrat contacted the newspaper on Monday for information about the confusion surrounding the vaccines at Rohnert Park.
Laurel Wroten, who is 66 and lives in Petaluma, is an example. She, her 83-year-old husband and 95-year-old father were vaccinated at the OptumServe clinic on Thursday, having scheduled appointments before the text on the company’s website was changed to limit vacancies for people aged 75 and over. On Monday morning, they learned that their appointments for second doses had disappeared from the scene.
To make things even more confusing, after entering the site, Wroten found a message that said, in part, “Appointments that are not visible have not been canceled. Scheduling for the first and second doses is not currently available. Please check again later. “
She was perplexed. In the early afternoon, Wroten logged on again and found that OptumServe had restored his appointment, almost at the same time that the company sent an email informing him that the appointment had been canceled “due to the supply of the vaccine”.
About 10 minutes after that, OptumServe confirmed the same appointment for Wroten.
Many people across the county reported similar experiences. They spent much of the day bewildered and in some cases panicked at the prospect of missing out on a dose of a highly contagious virus vaccine, especially a second dose that would increase their immunity to COVID-19 to about 95%.
By the end of Monday, many eligible seniors once again had appointments at the Rohnert Park clinic. County elected officials and health officials insisted that the OptumServe scheduling website would be resolved, but did not say when.
“I just want to say that I’m sorry for the thousands of people who have been confused and disappointed by the events of the past few days,” said county supervisor Chris Coursey.
Coursey said the second doses of the vaccine were rescheduled by OptumServe because several people, probably unintentionally, scheduled their second appointment very close to the first. This would undermine the county’s ability to vaccinate as many people as possible.