That moment marked the end of one journey and the beginning of another. Zayas had tried desperately for three weeks to get a vaccine for his father, with no luck. Finally, she felt hopeful. And the small 35-year-old businessman wanted to pay in advance.
Now she spends her nights flipping through several tabs open on the iPhone screen, running to help other people register. His focus: Spanish-speaking immigrants who are struggling to understand the system and get a place.
“It’s crazy,” says Zayas. “It doesn’t seem right that someone has to spend so much time and effort trying to get a vaccine. The people I help don’t have the luxury of staying at home looking … They are even more vulnerable to the virus because they are more exposed. They are the ones who make our food and clean hospitals and things like that, and they don’t have time. “
Here are some of the things they learned:
She’s getting frustrated calls from people who feel they’ve been excluded
But Robinson says that although she is immersed in these problems, she was surprised by the launch of the vaccine.
“The distribution is so chaotic, so disorganized, that we constantly try to catch up and put our parents in those places so they can get the vaccine,” she says.
Robinson says the people she talks to are increasingly desperate.
“I have so many people calling my phone looking for the vaccine, crying and upset … I’m dealing with a lot of frustration,” she says. “People are saying, ‘I know the vaccine is here, and I can’t get it, and I know that we are the most impacted.'”
For weeks, Robinson and other volunteers have been going door to door in poor neighborhoods in Albany to help people register for the vaccine.
If people they know have access to the Internet, they receive a QR code so they can sign up on their phones. If they don’t, volunteers will write down your information.
Robinson maintains a continuous list of names and keeps calling all the community leaders he can think of to try to secure more places.
It has been disappointing, she says, to hear some officials point out skepticism about the vaccine in communities of color as the reason for the disproportionate numbers.
“They use that as an excuse,” she says, “when there are so many ways in which access is the problem.”
The solution, she says, is to involve people in the community to hear their concerns – and then do everything possible to help them sign up.
Robinson took people to vaccination appointments and helped host emerging vaccination efforts.
She spoke to CNN the day before planning to go to a meat packaging factory and answer questions from workers concerned about the safety of the vaccine.
Her plan: tell them about all the research she did to make sure the vaccine is safe – and ask everyone in the room if they lost a loved one or were touched in any way by Covid.
She knows that almost everyone is going to raise their hand. And she hopes to be able to help all of them get vaccinated, despite all the obstacles in the way.
She says the lack of high-speed Internet puts her community at a disadvantage
While she is in the parking lot of the community center she drives in southern Dallas, Sherri Mixon looks at the long line of cars and thinks about all the layers of inequality that have been building up in the pandemic.
“Here you have a community of great disparity – lack of internet or technology, and sometimes both,” she says.
“It was the other way around,” she says. “There should have been more of a reflection process to make us understand that access to the internet and access to technology, these communities had none of that. That’s where the action plan should have been addressed.”
Mixon started registering people for vaccines after a person came and asked for help. From there, she says, it is a big effort to register hundreds of people every week. And now, she says, they’ve got some municipal funding to help.
“There are many problems … but this registration line, this improvised line is our first defense against this virus, registering them, making them take the vaccine,” she says. “Dallas needs to become complete. And this is the only way I know how to do that.”
He sees language barriers getting in the way
Peter Ng heard a common concern from many elderly people in his Los Angeles community who were struggling to sign up for vaccines.
Information on how to do this, he says, was only available in English and Spanish. This left out many immigrants who live in Chinatown and speak other languages.
The center started to compile a waiting list. It didn’t take long for it to have thousands of names.
At first, it was difficult for the center, which also operates a community health clinic, to get enough vaccines to help everyone who wanted one.
“We have been here for a long, long time. We are as American as anyone else, ”he says. “We shouldn’t be … neglected, just because we call ourselves Chinese or look like Chinese.”
Recently, the situation has improved, says Ng. The center’s volunteers have done everything they can to get more people to sign up. And the authorities have been supplying an increasing number of vaccine doses. So now, says Ng, patience is the key.
“We have to continue to be cautious, to protect ourselves, and time will take care of things,” he says.
She learned strategies with Facebook groups and looks for points every night
Late at night, Vivi Zayas sits on the bed, holding her phone – and her husband’s too. He sits next to her, watching a basketball game. She is involved in a different type of competition: trying to register people for vaccines.
Sometimes she screams when she succeeds.
“Did you just score?” her husband asks.
Weeks ago, Zayas made it his mission to learn everything he could about the vaccine registration process. She joined groups on Facebook to get tips, such as what time of day different pharmacies publish online appointments and how to fill out forms in advance so that you are ready to register when second slots become available.
“I started researching and managed to book one for my mom … Then my mom said, ‘Oh, can you find it for my friend from church?’ That’s how things escalated, “says Zayas.
Now, your phone is full of Spanish messages from others in the Philadelphia area, asking for help.
Since then, Zayas estimates that he has gotten dozens of appointments – many for people he has never met – and spends several hours every night trying. Sometimes, even with the tricks she knows, she can’t find any.
“It’s like playing the lottery … It’s very unfair,” says Zayas. “It is difficult enough for everyone and even more difficult for the Hispanic community, for immigrants and for people where English is not their first language.”
Scheduling vaccines is not Zayas’ daily job. She runs a cafeteria in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, that offers parties and storytelling events for children. But she thinks her experience in running a company has helped her to meet that challenge.
“You have to be tough. You have to go with the flow and really push, research and learn, ”she says. “If you don’t know how to do something, you find out and solve the problem.”
This is a problem that Zayas hopes he won’t have to solve for much longer. But as long as people in her community need help getting vaccines, she is determined to keep looking.