A volunteer-run website helps you find an appointment for a vaccine

It’s no secret that New York, like many other places in the United States, was to find difficult to with the distribution of the covid-19 vaccine. One of the problems is his mess online registration site, which some city officials denounced as “Complex, heavy and buggy.” Officials said it would create a barrier for many people, especially older people who are seen as a priority group for vaccination.

It’s there that New York Vaccine List Launched in mid-January, it is a user-friendly website created and managed by volunteers that analyzes appointment data for vaccines from multiple locations, such as clinic, drugstore websites and other places, and group them together. The site then presents the information on a page that shows locations with available vaccine appointments, locations that do not have vaccine appointments, and locations where the information is not up to date.

When it finds sites that have appointments for vaccines, NYC Vaccine List includes a sign up button, which takes users directly to the location’s website with availability. If it sounds simple, that’s because it is, and it’s a breath of fresh air in a time when everything seems more difficult. NYC Vaccine List is also great because you don’t have to click endless pages to find what you’re looking for like other websites do.

As reported by the edge, the website tackles one of the biggest challenges with online registrations for immunization appointments in New York City: fragmentation. The outlet points out that various entities including city, state, and hospital groups distribute the vaccine and use multiple registration websites. This means that in order to find a date, users have to check a variety of places, which can be undeniably frustrating.

Depending on the point of sale, software developer And Benamy experienced this chaos firsthand and decided to contact friends and colleagues to try and find a solution. Within days, they had created NYC Vaccine List, which currently lists appointment data for vaccines from about 40 sites.

In the past few weeks, Benamy said the website has been viewed tens of thousands of times.

“The tools are there to empower people to do amazing things, and we figured if there was at least a chance that we could help, we would take our chances,” Benamy told The Verge.

Their work on the site is not finished, however. Benamy said their top priority was to get more information on vaccine availability and that they continued to create more tools to extract information from other places. At the moment, he said the site offers information about dating in the greater metro area and Long Island. It aims to offer more information about appointments in the surrounding area.

As for lending a hand in New York City, Benamy said volunteers would love to help in any way they can. They would also welcome any data feeds on vaccine availability that could be incorporated into the New York Vaccine List.

The bottom line here is that while vaccine deployment is undeniably a difficult task, you don’t need to complicate it any further by setting up online mazes for people to be able to do. find. If volunteers can make it easy, New York and other places can too.

[The Verge]