By 6:00 o’clock Monday night, CHAS removed the scheduling tab from their website, and closed their phone lines.
It took less than an hour for them to fill up all of their available appointments.
For people like 77-year-old Judy Sheppard, it was only the latest round of frustrating bad news.
“I waited until 5 p.m., I practiced several times on the computer to make sure I got it correctly, so exactly at 5 p.m. I went on the computer, I did the questions on the page qualifications, I got exactly into doing the appointment- at 5:02- I started with appointment- I was 5,910- the number of users in front of me were 5,243- expected arrival time was 5:57..so I waited 50 minutes,” Judy said.
Judy waited 50 minutes to find out she wouldn’t be getting a vaccine appointment for the second week in a row.
“I have tried in this last week probably every single grocery store, every single pharmacy, every single thing you can think of that would even sell a needle,” Sheppard added.
Here’s the problem, Chas health had 3,000 doses last week, but they booked 4,500 appointments for the mass vaccination clinic, so they vaccinated 4,500 people.
They have 4,000 vaccine doses coming in Tuesday, which they appointments for today.
But, 1,500 doses have to go to the providers they borrowed from to make good on last week’s over-booked appointments- which stemmed from issues with the website.
Those issues didn’t come up Monday, but that doesn’t change the problem of a low supply… And high demand.
More people are running into this obstacle.
Under the current phase, more than 1.5 million people are eligible for the vaccine in Washington state, but the state has only gotten around 900,000 shots.
Washington State is getting about a 100,000 doses per week.
