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New Yorkers Eligible For COVID Vaccine Report Frustrations With City Registration Websites
By
Sydney Pereira
Published Jan 11, 2021
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Ron Adar/SOPA Images/Shutterstock
By
Sydney Pereira
Published Jan 11, 2021
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NYC has launched a city vaccine finder tool to help the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who are now eligible to schedule an appointment for the shot. But a patchwork of scheduling systems between providers and different government websites for making appointments has caused confusion—raising immediate questions about how older, less tech-savvy New Yorkers will gain access.
Comptroller Scott Stringer, a mayoral candidate, called the sign-up process "bewildering" on Sunday evening.
"We should be #1 in vaccinations in the nation from day one—and we should be using every tool at our disposal to vaccinate as many New Yorkers as possible as quickly as possible. Instead we’ve set up a gauntlet that requires tech support," Stringer wrote in a tweet.
The city has created an aggregated information site for vaccine locations called the NYC vaccine finder. But the Health Department and NYC Health + Hospitals still have sign-up sites for their locations, and clinics or other smaller healthcare centers have their individual sign-up processes as well. Those seeking appointments must fill out a multi-step verification process to set up an account and face about 51 questions or fields to check off on the Health Department's site, according to Stringer.
"Any barrier to getting shots in arms is only going to prolong the agony of this crisis," Stringer wrote.
Michelle Kuppersmith, a Lower East Side resident and community board member, said she was able to schedule an appointment for her 87-year-old grandmother after an hour of working with the "buggy" websites.
On Health + Hospitals system, she couldn't find any appointments, and got an alert to check for other virus testing locations, rather than additional vaccine locations.
"I was able to make her one after a lot of trouble," Kuppersmith said. "It's really difficult to load. So after many, many tries of refreshing, reentering the information, over and over again, I was finally able to get the appointments to actually show."
Her grandmother doesn't own a computer and would not have been able to sign up online alone.
"She would not have been able to do it by herself. 100%, no," Kuppersmith added. "This is criminal."
On Monday, the city launched a hotline—877-VAX-4NYC—to make appointments by phone, with 750 customer service reps answering the phones 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. De Blasio said 24/7 hours are coming soon.
New York State will launch its own hotline at 4 p.m. Monday at 1-833-NYS-4VAX.
The state also set up another website for New Yorkers to determine eligibility and schedule an appointment. Demand is expected to outweigh supplies, so Governor Andrew Cuomo's office noted those eligible should be prepared to schedule an appointment as far as 14 weeks in the future.
Electa Brown, a media arts professor at Long Island University in Brooklyn, said she spent 4.5 hours on the vaccine finder site to look for a location and make an appointment after her union alerted her to the expanded vaccine priority levels.
"You fill in all the information about how you qualify, and do you have allergies, and insurance information, all of this stuff, and then suddenly, it says, 'oh, sorry can you try again in 30 minutes,'" Brown said.
Cobble Hill resident Ilya Scharrenbroich had to help his mother secure an appointment due to a repeated error message on the Health Department site.
"She was about to give up," he said.
Scharrenbroich, as did Kuppersmith, suspected they needed to clear their browsers' cookies for the website to allow them to go through the entire sign-up process.
"You can't expect an older person to do that," Scharrenbroich said.
When asked about the difficulties on Monday, Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters, "We absolutely want the simplest possible system."
"We want them to have as easy an experience as possible making their appointments. That said, there's really important information that is required by law," he added. "That's the balance point here."
The NYC vaccine finder portal is a "single point" for people to find locations and make an appointment, de Blasio added.
Commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, Jessica Tisch, said the finder aggregates information from multiple providers in one location.
It is a "tool for information aggregation so that there is one place so that they can look to see all of the providers who may have appointments available," she said.
Tisch acknowledged each provider may have its own system for sign-ups, but said the city is taking customer feedback to make recommendations to providers.
Around 55,000 appointments are already booked through Saturday. Another 50,000 appointments are online for slots starting January 16th.
The city discourages anyone showing up to a site without a vaccine appointment, but people who do will be matched up with a navigator to make an appointment.
De Blasio and city officials are watching to see if vaccine administrations rise now that access has been expanded to both phases 1a and 1b—including healthcare workers, long term care facility staff and residents, teachers, first responders, public transit workers, and adults at least 75 years old. De Blasio wants the city to administer 175,000 doses this week and 1 million by the end of January.
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vaccines
COVID-19
coronavirus
technical issues
Sydney Pereira
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