When Chris Edwards, 59, found out that all Los Angeles County residents 65 and older could receive a coronavirus vaccine, she raced to the internet to enroll her 80-year-old mother.
What she found at VaccinateLACounty.com was a hodge-podge of options sending her to various portals — buttons linked to sites operated by the county or the city of Los Angeles or a collection of community clinics and hospitals or a long list of supermarket pharmacies.
She tried to register at Dodger Stadium, but most of the slots were already full. The county hotline at 833-540-0473 wasn’t much better. Edwards said the line disconnected three times before she gave up.
“I felt very betrayed because I couldn’t get her signed up,” Edwards said. “I thought to myself ‘I feel bad for anybody who has no access to a computer or is computer illiterate.’”
What Edwards experienced was shared by thousands of county residents who sped to their computers this week after a plan to vaccinate seniors was hastily announced late Monday, rolled out by Tuesday — ahead of schedule — and administered by Wednesday.
While thousands of people were able to sign up for a vaccine, many were not, battling a severely limited, sporadically arriving supply, the extraordinary demand for the available slots and a flurry of technical challenges.
The problems can be traced to the thin, unpredictable supply, officials say. Although more appointments opened up Wednesday, by Thursday just about every slot was once again full. The shortfall launched a kind of “whack a mole” game online, with vaccine-seekers trying to snatch appointments before they disappeared.
Adding to the frustration were website and phone issues, which county leaders vowed to correct with a new system by next week. County Board of Supervisors Chair Hilda Solis pledged to improve the navigation and functionality of the system as well as increase capacity at the county call center.
“There are serious problems with the rollout of this vaccination plan — especially with the website,” said Supervisor Janice Hahn on Thursday. “I know people are frustrated because I have been getting those calls in my office. We are working around the clock to address these problems.”
Solis pointed out, however, that even amid the problems, thousands were making appointments and getting their shots.
“I want to underscore that many people 65 years of age have been successful in scheduling appointments,” Solis said, “and I have heard from many of residents across the county how relieved they are to be immunized and that it gives them such joy they will be able to reunite with their family again soon.”
“The most important thing is to get more doses of this vaccine so we can open more appointments,” added Hahn.
At-risk population
Why did county officials add seniors to the vaccine eligibility list this week, after initially vowing to inoculate only healthcare workers in the first wave?
Their mission was to save lives, they said.
Roughly 67% of the 14,500 people who have died from coronavirus in L.A. County were 65 and older.
“This is the population that is dying at the highest rate,” said Hahn, who on Monday joined fellow Supervisor Kathryn Barger in public pleas, urging public health officials to vaccinate the county’s 65-and-older residents. Days earlier, Gov. Gavin Newsom altered state rules to allow local leaders to do so.
“I still think everyone 65 and older needs to get vaccinated as soon as they can,” Hahn said.
In response, board chair Solis issued an extraordinary executive order late Monday, instructing public health officials to make it so.
The challenge: The county simply does not have enough vaccines to inoculate all 1.4 million seniors right away.
The county has received on average about 145,000 doses per week. The allotments are directed to local officials by state officials, from the federal stockpile. Local officials call the supply line smaller than and much more unpredictable then expected. It’s a common complaint across the nation.
For a population of 10 million, the pace is far too slow, officials here say. So far, the county has received about 900,000 doses when it needs about 4 million doses — accounting for both first and second doses for seniors and roughly 800,000 healthcare workers.
Complicating the process: Coordinating vaccine-getters’ second doses while thousands clamor for their first. The need for second doses means that if the same number of vaccines are received next week, just about 30% would be available for first doses, the rest reserved for second-dose recipients.
Officials vow that all second doses will be secured, so there is no need to worry. In most cases, residents were given an appointment on site for the second shot while getting shot No. 1, though in a small percentage of cases, they were not, officials acknowledged.
Officials have also had to deal with missed appointments — and concern that too many “no shows” could lead to unused, squandered doses, which cannot go back into storage at day’s end.
In cases where appointments go unfilled, there is supposed to be a system in place for offering those doses to available recipients. But in at least one instance Tuesday, healthcare workers at Dodger Stadium were offering people 65 and older to come to the site without an appointment, in messages posted on social media.
A spokeswoman for the mayor’s office, however, said this was absolutely not official policy. Officials stressed that appointments were absolutely mandatory and anyone without one would be turned away.
Stadium ways
That wasn’t the only issue at the ballpark this week. On Wednesday, lines stretched for hours, with inoculations lasting until 11 p.m. Close to 8,000 received doses there that day.
A spokesperson for L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti said delays were caused by the many people who showed up without appointments, as well as other issues with the registration platform.
Those issues, the spokesperson said, have been resolved and Thursday saw wait times but back to 30 minutes.
Garcetti on Thursday roamed the Dodger Stadium site. Into the evening, he stood and listened — masked and at a safe distance — to tales told by folks who waited in line, many of them irked by the process.
Amid the issues, the mayor touted the massive effort at the ballpark, which he said will be able to serve up 12,000 people a day when it can run at full capacity.
By the end of Friday, he said, the city will have completed vaccination for all residents of the city’s skilled nursing facilities.
Still, he acknowledged that for now “demand far outstrips supply.” There’s a long road ahead, he added.
65 and 75
Los Angeles resident Margie Harris-Hightower, 81, was so frustrated by her inability to make an appointment, she drove to the opening of the massive Dodger Stadium site last week. She was turned way.
“I’m over 65 and should have had it weeks ago,” she said, adding she has been a member of Kaiser for decades.
“It’s a complete mess,” she said of the rollout. “It’s been a mess. I’m in a high-risk group. Also, I’m 80 years old. I should be in the first tier. They should have made sure from the beginning… We should have been in the first tier. We’re the ones most likely to die from this virus.”
With the age category reduced from its earlier 75-and-older threshold, Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, was concerned that people older than 75 will have less access to precious doses.
“My sense is that those persons 65 to 75 are going to be more nimble and familiar with online registration procedures and the use of internet,” Kim-Farley said. “So we could see larger numbers in the 65 to 75 age group capturing the limited appointments available for receiving vaccine.”
Guidance from DC?
Zev Yaraslovsky, a former Los Angeles County supervisor and director of the Los Angeles Initiative at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, said the confusion has stemmed from a lack of a national plan. Hopes the President Joe Biden administration will remedy that.
“I don’t put this on the county or the city exclusively,” he said. “Everybody’s culpable on this, starting with the White House on down and hopefully this is going to change in the days ahead with the new leadership.”
He said he can’t blame seniors for their frustration and questions — the result of mixed messages among federal, state and local authorities that have all muddied the messaging.
“To the average person… not savvy to the jurisdictional issues,” Yaraslovsky said, “they are just saying what are the rules, and ‘hey, I’m 70 years old. Am I eligible or not eligible? The next day I hear something else from my local officials.’ People don’t know what the rules are.”
And the Board of Supervisors are hearing that frustration from their constituents, he said.
“It’s a legitimate position for the board to say, ‘how many vaccines can we give?’” he said. “I don’t think the board is just caving to political pressure. They are asking what can we do to get some people 65 and old started through the pipeline. And when the pipeline starts to flow again we can ramp up further … It’s a tough call. “
Ultimately, though, what has to improve, he said, is communication. “There’s been a total communication failure on the part of all levels of government,” he said.
Snagging a slot
“They should have realized,” Chris Edwards said, “that people would overwhelm the system.”
Still, she refused to give up.
After failing to land an appointment for her mom Tuesday, she circled back to her computer Wednesday.
She pecked away. Eventually, Edwards tried the L.A. City portal via Carbon Health — which she said worked much smoother. She snagged a slot at Dodger Stadium next Tuesday.
In the end, she took a deep breath and moved on. Though frustrated, she even paused to empathize with the county’s leaders.
“I think it boils down to the fact that our country has not done a mass vaccination program since polio and we’ve got nobody around who figured out how they rolled that out,” Edwards said. “Plus, we’re a much larger country than we were back then.”
"Many" - Google News
January 22, 2021 at 10:13AM
https://ift.tt/3o7GEYM
Coronavirus vaccine rollout in LA County leaving many frustrated - LA Daily News
"Many" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2QsfYVa
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Coronavirus vaccine rollout in LA County leaving many frustrated - LA Daily News"
Post a Comment