The electronic system for booking vaccines COVID-19 in the Portland area reached its boiling point this week – not just for the many thousands of embittered seniors who tried unsuccessfully for hours to schedule appointments on a slow and troubled website, but for state leaders who finally realized.
Friday, the day after area residents made 400,000 attempts to schedule just 3,800 appointments, Oregon Health Authority Director Patrick Allen announced a major change.
Seniors who want to schedule appointments at the Oregon Convention Center in northeastern Portland are apparently now required to register their names in the state. The state will send a list of eligible names to operators at the Convention Center’s mass vaccination clinic, and operators will contact residents when their turn to get in line for vaccination comes.
“So you don’t have to wait three hours clicking, hoping to get one,” said Allen.
But much remains uncertain about how the system will work, including its apparent design as a random lottery. Vaccination site operators did not respond to questions from The Oregonian / OregonLive on Friday about the new process and were not at the news conference on Friday when state officials announced the change.
The change in the way nominations will be distributed does not affect people who have already booked a nearby spot, officials said.
The new nomination process will not apply to people with mobility problems who are looking for photos at the Portland International Airport drive-thru location. They will still have to compete online or over the phone, when appointments are cleared for scheduling at 9am on Mondays and Thursdays.
Allen said he watched online traffic jams created twice a week, when the two Portland area mass vaccination clinics released consultations. Problems began to arise instantly on February 8, the first day that elderly people aged 80 and over vied for appointments – and only continued the following week, when residents aged 75 and older also became eligible.
Allen said this week’s confusion – when residents 70 and older joined the crazy confusion – pushed him into action. The move comes just before 215,000 unvaccinated Oregon residents, aged 65 to 69, become eligible for their first doses next Monday.
“We went through the first two weeks with a lot of traffic jam (s), but this week was very, very extreme,” said Allen.
The clinic’s operators – which include Legacy Health, Oregon Health & Science University, Kaiser Permanente and Providence Health & Services – said earlier this week that the problems identified on Monday would be fixed. But on Thursday, they apparently admitted defeat, while the Oregon Health Authority separately acknowledged the problems with its own website, but said it was not related to an increase in web traffic.
Allen’s support for creating a registry – or, as he put it, “an invitation system” – is in stark contrast to his stance days before the launch for seniors starts earlier this month. Allen had agreed that allowing up to 768,000 seniors to become eligible over three weeks, when there was not enough vaccine to meet demand, would create “chaos”.
“In the coming week, many older adults will inevitably express frustration,” he told reporters at the time. “Next week, you won’t have to look far to see people confused. We will fall short. “
Under the new plan, Oregon residents seeking an appointment at the Oregon Convention Center next week must register at getvaccinated.oregon.gov and click on the blue “Get Started” box. They can also call 211 or 866-698-6155 to sign up.
Clinic operators did not answer questions asked by The Oregonian / OregonLive on Friday about when they will start scheduling appointments for eligible seniors. They also did not answer questions about whether the elderly would receive estimates of how long they would have to wait or whether they would be told about their place in the queue.
But Allen said he estimated that by the end of mid-March, all seniors, educators and people in phase 1a, which largely includes healthcare professionals, would have received their first doses, if they so desired. This is because of higher vaccine shipments expected from the federal government.
Operators at the vaccination site also did not answer a question about the method that will be used – order of arrival, first served or older first – that will be used to distribute the appointments.
Allen, however, said that the names will be selected at random and older elders will not have priority over younger ones.
“If we prioritize, we will effectively be making younger people no longer eligible and we will not do that,” he said.
Allen acknowledged that there will be more challenges in the short term, saying that the elderly should expect to “become frustrated and unhappy” in the next two weeks.
“But the landscape changes dramatically for the better,” he said, “in mid-March.”
Oregon plans to expand eligibility for the vaccine on March 29 to include people aged 45 to 64 with underlying health problems, in addition to some groups of people, including farm workers and those who are homeless.
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– Aimee Green; [email protected]; @o_aimee