After scheduling just 1,950 new appointments at the Oregon Convention Center last week for seniors and members of Phase 1a, the Oregon Health Authority announced in effect immediately on Monday that it will dramatically increase the number of COVID-19 vaccination appointments. for seniors to at least 15,000 a week for the next three weeks.
Portland area seniors will no longer have to wait for a call from an overloaded call center to schedule an appointment, once they have been selected at random from the state’s getvaccinated.oregon.gov registry. Instead, many will receive an individualized link via email that can be used to select available times and schedule times on their own, state officials said.
The changes came after the state unveiled a new system last week that required senior citizens who wanted appointments at the Convention Center to register, wait until their names were drawn and received a call from a call center representative offering them hours . As of the end of last week, 152,000 seniors aged 65 and over in the Portland area had registered, but the Convention Center vaccination site scheduled only 1,950 new appointments – in fact, scheduling only 1.3% of people on the registry
“To improve this manual and time-intensive process, this new approach will now allow for much faster (consultations) and in larger volumes, which will be needed as the vaccine supply expands,” says a press release on Monday.
The Oregon Health Authority says it is committed to allocating at least 15,000 first doses to older adults over the next three weeks, until the end of March, when Director Patrick Allen expects 70-75% of seniors to have received their first doses.
But 15,000 doses delivered per week will cover less than a third of Portland area seniors who are registered for the Convention Center nominating lottery by the end of March. The number of people on the register, however, probably includes elderly people who may have been vaccinated elsewhere, such as at pharmacies where they have been able to make appointments since they registered.
The Oregon Health Authority described last week’s 1,950 appointments as “a successful weekend driver” – yet some seniors said it took 48 to more than 72 hours for the call center to contact them, they were unable to speak to the live person at 211 to ask questions or did not receive an email confirming their appointments. Others were disappointed that they were not selected and the process was going very slowly. But many were also relieved that they didn’t have to compete online for appointments at a set time – and endure a slow website that sometimes crashed or kicked them out, as it had in previous weeks.
Portland area health providers have designated the Convention Center for the Elderly with no mobility issues. Providers say a visit may involve standing or waiting for one to two hours.
Elderly people with mobility problems should try to schedule appointments at the other mass vaccination site in the Portland area, the economy red parking lot at Portland International Airport, where visitors drive in their cars. To make an appointment there, the elderly still need to go online at 9 am on Mondays and Thursdays to try to get the vaccination schedule. This Monday, like what happened on the last Monday and Thursday, the commitments at the airport ended in 10 to 15 minutes.
It is unclear which system state and local health care providers will use on March 29, when hundreds of thousands of Oregon residents aged 45 or older with underlying diseases – as well as homeless people and frontline workers, such as agricultural workers – will be eligible for vaccinations.
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– Aimee Green; [email protected]; @o_aimee