After two months of trying I finally was able to make an appointment to be inoculated against COVID-19. It required a solid hour of effort yesterday and I am quite certain that anyone less determined and knowledgeable than I would have given up in frustration.
I attribute the enormous difficulty to incompetence at all levels of government in Illinois and in the implementation of Cook County’s appointment web site. It took me more than 50 tries on Cook County’s appointment web site, every single try misleading.
The incompetence included but was not limited to:
- How “essential workers” are define here. I learned yesterday, somewhat to my surprise, that I probably could have substantiated a case that I was an essential worker and lined up my appointment weeks ago while only group 1a was being vaccinated rather than after eligibility was opened up to old people like me (1b). The notion that I am an essential worker is arrant nonsense. Defining it so broadly is incompetent.
- According to my contacts around the country the state’s involvement and restrictions in the distribution of vaccine are apparently significantly higher here than in other places including New York, California, Florida, other big states in which I have contacts as well as in adjoining states like Iowa, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Missouri. That is incompetent.
- It was pretty obvious that I was subjected to racial discrimination including both direct discrimination based on my race and redlining based on where I lived. I can understand the argument that the discrimination itself was not incompetent but making it so obvious was incompetent.
- I could identify a thousand ways in which the operation of the web application I used to make the appointment could have been made workable, particularly for people who aren’t technologically savvy. Pro tip: it is very, very difficult to make a single app workable for both web and mobile users. One or the other or, in the case of this app, both will find it unworkable. It’s actually easier and cheaper to develop two different apps, one for web users and one for mobile users. But that requires knowledgeable people and I know from direct experience how difficult it is to find them. Apps that time out and require users to start over from the beginning of the process were developed by incompetents. Or, in the case of Cook County’s app, time out and make it easier for users to start the process over than to retry after the timeout. Timeouts themselves are a sign of incompetence but I’m more sympathetic with them. But the design of the app!
Grrrr.
That damned Donald Trump.
“I could identify a thousand ways in which the operation of the web application…..”
I’ve told you a million times – don’t exaggerate……
I’m not exaggerating. If anything I’m understating. Nearly every keystroke or mouse event as well as every prompt, caption, or data element on the screen was poorly designed.
Asking for data you already needed to supply just to get as far as you have is incompetent. I know why they did but that was incompetent, too.
I just don’t understand you, Dave. sarc/ Why, every covid related strategy, program or pronouncement from government and the health care community has been spot on, carefully crafted and well grounded in science. Well, at least for a day or two…..
If only we had real leadership at the top. You know, like Cuomo.
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/one-year-ago-gather-crowds-masks-are-useless-only-few-percent-are-vulnerable
Didn’t find that at all.
My wife was inoculated in January at the reservation clinic. They wouldn’t do me. Racist you know.
Thought I’d wait until May but then I got an invite for the Phizer shot from my pulmonologist in March.
So. Done. I hope.
I am not surprised Dave. Every app and program I have used when designed by a free market company has always worked perfectly and been very easy to use. Clearly the government should not have designed that app themselves and contracted it out to some private entity.
Also, have to agree with Drew that overall the government response has been disappointing. Looked at in total compared with other countries we have been about average, but we had a lot more resources. Of course it is leadership that matters and our leader in chief exhibited very little positive leadership, so ultimately it is surprising that we have been average given how bad our top line leadership behaved. As people keep pointing out, those CEOs and top leaders are important for performance at the corporate level and so it was also true for government.
Steve
I got my first shot on Friday (Pfizer) through the VA. I got on the list a couple of months ago thinking it wouldn’t be until summer because I’m almost in the last category here in Colorado.
Then Thursday I got a text message on my phone from an automated VA system asking me to text back a day and time in March. I replied “anytime” and the system slotted me in the next day. I showed up and was in and out in 35 minutes with an appointment for my second shot in 3 weeks.
The VA does a lot of stuff wrong, but they really got this right.
I hope the rest of the process goes smoothly for you Dave.
New York’s wasn’t any better. Initially vaccines were meant for healthcare workers and first-responders, but there was so much bad PR from the vaccines that were thrown away that they quickly followed Florida’s lead by expanding eligibility to those over 65 (which they criticized at the time, of course). When the vaccine registration site went up, it was a fiasco. You entered your information to see if you qualified, followed by your zip code, and it was supposed to list the locations nearest to you so you can set up an appointment. Except the locations listed (and there were hundreds) had no vaccines, nor had no expectations when they would receive them. Apparently the story was NY had a list of locations that they planned to distribute vaccines at some point in the future, and that list was mistakenly put up as having vaccines available. That wasn’t corrected until over a week later, so these unfortunate locations were inundated with calls from people trying to set up appointments; frustrating for them I’m sure, as well as those trying to get their vaccinations.
It didn’t get better. After they corrected their mistake on the website, it went from offering hundreds to offering just one for my location in Brooklyn, a county of over 2.5 million. It went like that for weeks until Rite-Aid and Walgreen’s got involved with their own registration process. NY’s website was so bad, that some NY’ers on their own initiative made their own websites with up-to-date information on which locations had appointments available.
When Rite-Aid made their registration available, that first day they were swamped. I went on with my phone and my laptop (as I was registering both my parents), and there was a que of over 10,000. I thought for sure I was going to be timed out at some point in the processes, or the counter would stop counting down in real-time, but impressively their system held up on both the mobile and desktop pages.
A queue was one of the ways that occurred to me to address the problem.
I also didn’t mention that I had problems with Walgreens’s, CVS’s, and Jewel-Osco’s systems as well. Every morning at 6:00am for weeks and weeks I went to each of them plus Cook County’s and Chicago’s. After a while I started calling individual stores.
My first step was contacting my PCP who told me that the hospital system with which she was affiliated (one of the couple of large systems in the area) had no vaccine because the County was handling distribution itself.
Chicago and Illinois keep stomping on your face, and you won’t leave. This is a kind of co-dependency.
My county’s app had an amusing defect. The initial menu asked you whether you were in the eligible group(s) or not. If you selected yes, you were sent to an appointments page. If you selected no, you were sent to the same appointments page.
Apparently this was a well known feature; a radio personality heard about it, got an appointment then reported it to the County, who kind of said, keep your appointment for doing someone else’s work.
I agree. Most vaccine signup websites I’ve seen in central Iowa have poorly defined logic and unfriendly navigation with the worst being county government (Testing? Their logo wouldn’t even display on iPhone); next local grocery store/pharmacy chains (first required all personal info including upload of photos of medical insurance cards and then they made you search through dozens of stores looking for available vaccine). National chain Walgreens required creating an account first and then presented you available First Dose dates and then block you from proceeding when a Second Dose date was not available and miscalculated Pfizer 2nd dose 28 days after when it should be 21. I found CVS to have the best website and execution getting my 2nd dose 21 days later.
Lastly, why does there appear to be disparity in vaccine allocation to states and the rollout phases between states. Some states dropped minimum age from 65 to 60 then 50 weeks ago. My wife turns 65 in July. To get a shot today she’d have to have a precondition like being an overweight smoker or cuts meat in a slaughterhouse. Our governor declared April 5 will begin the “Everyone else free for all†phase.
Hard to understand how a technologically advanced country can fail so badly.
We’re human.
We only perfect through repetition and redundancy.
Some you can do mentally, some you can’t.
This is a first run for everyone.
“Hard to understand how a technologically advanced country can fail so badly.”
Simple. Government.