Even after Maria DaSilva became eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine, there was one big barrier to making an appointment online: she does not own a computer.
When DaSilva, 82, learned that people were getting vaccinated in Rhode Island, she went to East Providence City Hall. There she was told she would have to wait a few more weeks — maybe three — before she became eligible.
Over the next few weeks, she went back to City Hall several more times. Finally, officials told her she could register for a vaccine appointment, but she couldn’t do it in person. She would have to use the state website.
DaSilva lives alone and sometimes has trouble communicating in English, which is her second language.
She has four daughters who live in or near East Providence. But DaSilva had seen few people since the pandemic began. Her granddaughter, Elizabeth, works at Rhode Island Hospital, so she worried about contracting the virus from her. She stopped going to the grocery store and running other errands many months ago. There are too many people wearing their masks improperly, she said.
“It’s better to stay away,” she said. “I want to be far away from these people.”
It was DaSilva’s granddaughter, Elizabeth, who was able to register her for the vaccine at a city vaccination site in Providence on Feb. 20 — weeks after she became eligible. By then, the state had opened registration up to some people who were 65 and older in specific locales, expanding the pool that for weeks had been just for those 75 and older.
“I’m 82!” DaSilva exclaimed. “People who are 65 could get appointments, but not me.”
Her frustrations are common among elderly residents and their loved ones in the state. Limited vaccine supply, confusing websites and unclear information have left many seniors exasperated.
But because of what the vaccine represents — a chance to leave behind the limited and often lonely life of a senior during the pandemic — most found a way.
The rollout
Rhode Island’s vaccine rollout was slower than almost any other state in early February, hovering around the bottom five in the number of vaccine doses administered per capita.
State officials said their strategy was to focus on equity in the vaccine rollout, rather than on vaccinating as many people as quickly as possible.
That meant the state limited vaccinations to groups that are at high risk of contracting the virus — health-care workers, nursing home residents, first responders and inmates in correctional facilities — for the first month and a half.
Rhode Island was the last state to open up vaccine eligibility to people 75 and older, and the sluggishness of the rollout became a source of frustration for many residents.
The state entered into partnerships with CVS and Walgreens in order to decentralize vaccine distribution and get shots into people’s arms more quickly.
However, slots for vaccinations at pharmacy locations were limited, and they filled up quickly. So many people tried to register for the vaccine at CVS that the company’s website began registering patients at locations out of state when there were no slots left. (A CVS spokesperson later said that the site had been updated to avoid this issue.)
Dr. Philip Chan, consultant medical director at the state Department of Health, said limited supply in the state was responsible for the scarce vaccine appointments.
“We just haven't had enough supply, which is why people have been frustrated,” he said. But, he said, all states have been experiencing limited supply. The difference in Rhode Island, Chan argued, was that the state was, at first, giving those few doses to people who were most at risk.
Chan emphasized that it’s not easy to build a centralized system for distributing vaccines. Chan said the state’s centralized signup link for vaccine appointments — vaccinateri.org — is now up and running and that people can register to get vaccinated at state-run sites or follow links to pharmacy sites from there.
“All states are really building infrastructure from scratch, and there are a lot of nuances,” Chan said. “It is an incredibly logistically complex process.”
What it took to get an appointment
Several elderly residents and their loved ones interviewed for this story said they woke up in the early morning on the first day that vaccine appointments were available in order to reserve a slot. Residents were not told when appointments would be posted to registration websites, so they had to guess.
Heather Sullivan, a 46-year-old Johnston resident, woke up just after midnight and again at 5:30 a.m. on Feb. 6, the first day that CVS opened vaccine registration for those 75 and older, in order to reserve a slot for her 84-year-old father. Thirty minutes after she made her father an appointment — around 6:30 a.m. — all the slots were full.
Karin Morse, a 59-year-old administrator at Moses Brown School, found signup websites frustrating. Her parents are 89 and 93, and each has had health problems: father Ted has had multiple heart attacks and was hospitalized with a stroke in November; Morse’s mother has had health issues that have required in-person physician care during the pandemic.
The two live in Medway Place, an apartment complex for seniors located near Wayland Square in Providence. Their next-door neighbor died of COVID-19 several weeks ago. Medway Place is physically connected to Bethany Home, an assisted living and rehab facility that has seen numerous COVID-19 cases.
When Morse saw that vaccines would become widely available for people 75 and older at pharmacies, she sprung into action. First, she made accounts for her parents on Walgreens’ website. Walgreens was where her parents went for pharmaceutical needs, and there was one just down the road from them on Pitman Street. Then she waited.
She learned that appointments were available, so she started spending hours each day refreshing the page, often sitting on her couch. After several days, her father, still an active engineering research professor at Brown who is good with technology, started refreshing the page himself.
“He was getting sort of desperate,” Morse said. “He was saying, ‘We need this.’ ”
When checking for appointments, the two had to answer an eligibility question. “Select the first statement that describes you:” the website said. The first option said: “I am a healthcare worker.” No, Morse thought. “I am an essential frontline worker,” was the next option. Then, “I have a high-risk medical condition,” followed by the final option, “None of the above.”
Morse started with “None of the above.” The system would not let her check for appointments and gave her an error message. She tried: “I have a high-risk medical condition,” which was true for both of her parents. She tried separating her mother's and father’s accounts. She tried creating new accounts with different emails. No success.
Eventually, she called the Walgreens pharmacist who usually filled her parents’ prescriptions and asked why the system would not let her eligible parents register. The pharmacist told her there was a glitch on the website, and the way to register was to check off the box for “I am a healthcare worker.”
"That just didn't seem right to me,” Morse said. But she knew her parents needed to be vaccinated, so Morse tried checking the box later that day. It worked.
She reserved her father an appointment at the Pitman Street location. In the few minutes it took her to switch to her mother’s account and fill out the eligibility questionnaire, the Pitman Street appointments were gone. She reserved the first slot she saw on Admiral Street in Providence for her mother, a retired chemistry professor, on the same day as her father’s appointment.
Sally Rahman, an 82-year-old retired office manager who lives in Warwick, happened upon an open vaccine slot by accident. Rahman had called vaccine information hotlines, sent emails to public officials and signed herself up to be notified when she was eligible. When she became eligible, she was determined to pursue every possible avenue. She signed up for accounts on the Walgreens and CVS vaccine portals. Rahman often logged on in the morning, afternoon and evening to check for slots. At first, she had no luck.
Rahman became frustrated with the seeming sluggishness of Rhode Island’s rollout. Her daughter and son in Oregon, and her sister and brother-in-law in Ohio, had already gotten their shots.
She typically logged on to the pharmacies’ vaccine portals for the last time around 10 or 11 p.m. before she went to sleep. But one night, she awoke around 1:30 a.m.
She thought to check the CVS app. She opened the app on her phone, and as she put it: “By golly there was an opening!”
“I wanted to yell, jump, scream,” she said. “But I couldn’t wake my neighbors.” She claimed the slot, but to her dismay, the system kicked her out. She frantically logged back in. The spot was still there. And she claimed it.
“I feel lucky,” she said. “It was an exercise in patience.”
Rahman knows that others in the state are having trouble getting vaccines as well, and reasons that those less attentive and perhaps less technologically savvy than her might have even more trouble.
One of her neighbors was given the first dose of the vaccine after being hospitalized for non-COVID reasons two months ago. But the neighbor doesn’t have a working computer, Rahman said, so she hasn’t been able to make an appointment for a second dose. Rahman thought to help her register, but concluded that she was not supposed to make appointments for other people.
“I imagine there are a lot of people for whom this is not an easy thing to do,” she said.
A changing strategy
After lagging behind most other states in early February, Rhode Island has taken multiple steps to “step up its game,” as Chan put it.
The state has opened two mass vaccination sites at the Dunkin' Donuts Center in Providence and the Citizens Bank building in Cranston and plans to open three more sites around the state.
It now tells residents when new appointments will be posted for registration on the state’s vaccine portal. The state started receiving 6,500 more doses per week from the federal government in late February.
Rhode Island has jumped from the bottom five in doses administered per capita to the upper half of the rankings, according to The New York Times vaccine tracker.
The City of Providence and other municipalities have begun receiving vaccine doses from the state to distribute. Providence opened municipal vaccination sites to 65-and-older residents in certain hard-hit zip codes — 02907, 02908 and 02909 — several days before the state, in an effort to reach residents in neighborhoods with the most COVID-19 cases.
But even with new changes to put Rhode Island’s rollout back on track, problems persisted. On one day at the state’s two mass vaccination sites, 16% of those vaccinated were under 65. They were able to reserve appointments by lying when filling out the questionnaire on the signup portal.
Ben Glickman is a sophomore at Brown University. He wrote this story for an advanced feature writing class taught by retired Journal reporter Tracy Breton.
The Link LonkMarch 12, 2021 at 06:01PM
https://www.providencejournal.com/story/news/healthcare/2021/03/12/getting-vaccine-appointment-not-easy-some-older-rhode-islanders/4642967001/
For some older Rhode Islanders, getting a COVID vaccine appointment was not easy - The Providence Journal
https://news.google.com/search?q=easy&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
No comments:
Post a Comment