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Residents of Clark County continue to struggle with the online system to make appointments for COVID-19 vaccination at the Clark County Event Center at the Ridgefield Fairgrounds.
On Sunday afternoon, a new batch of appointments became available online, but dozens of residents said they were kicked out of the dating portal or saw the website crash, according to emails and calls received by the Colombian, as well as a community briefing Monday hosted by Clark County Public Health.
The forum, posted on Facebook, was organized to help answer residents’ questions about vaccine allocation and where to get vaccinated, but questions regarding issues with the appointment portal remain.
The fairground mass vaccination site is managed by the Washington State Department of Health. Safeway / Alberstons administered vaccines at the fairgrounds, along with the US National Guard.
Clark County Public Health is not involved in the fairground site or the appointment portal.
Lauren Jenks, who represented the Department of Health at the forum, said she was aware the website crashed the first time around, but was unaware of the most recent crash.
“It’s super frustrating,” Jenks said.
Jill McGinnis, director of communications and public affairs at Safeway / Albertsons, said the pharmacy team was not aware of any crashes or issues with the appointment portal, but acknowledged that the website had experienced significant traffic once appointments were available.
Safeway / Albertsons does not operate the portal. McGinnis said it was run by a third-party vendor called Kordinator. McGinnis said a Safeway / Albertsons pharmacy team will contact Kordinator to advise them of the issues.
She said Safeway / Albertsons has no plans to stop vaccinating anytime soon, and stressed that patience will be key as the number of people eligible for vaccination currently outstrips the supply of vaccines available.
Other planned vaccination sites
While public health is not involved at the site near Ridgefield, it continues to work with an incident management team to prepare the county’s immunization infrastructure for an increased vaccine supply.
The county plans to have several larger-scale vaccination sites, in addition to mobile vaccination clinics that can vaccinate people in adult family homes and also larger essential workplaces such as food processing factories.
At the moment, it is difficult to deploy these options due to the limited vaccine supply. Last week, the majority of the county’s vaccines went to the fairground. A total of 3,060 vaccines were administered at the fairgrounds last week, easily exceeding the state’s goal of 500 vaccinations per day.
There are currently factors limiting the county’s ability to administer the vaccine. The vaccine supply is still far less than the number of people eligible for the vaccine, according to Dr. Steven Krager, Clark County deputy health director.
“There just aren’t enough vaccines right now,” Krager said. “We are administering as fast as possible, but we just don’t have enough. Hope this will change in the future. “
For this week, the state has requested more than 358,000 doses of the vaccine from the federal government, which means Washington immunization clinics, health care providers and pharmacies have estimated they have the capacity to administer approximately 358,000 doses of vaccine this week.
However, the state has only received 107,000 doses of the vaccine from the federal government, leaving it well below that capacity. There are currently about 1.7 million Washingtonians eligible for the vaccine.
Clark County typically receives nearly 4,000 doses per week, but the county has between 50,000 and 75,000 eligible people at this time.
The supply of vaccines is expected to increase at least a little in the near future, which should help some. The state also expects the federal government to give vaccine allocation notice for the next three weeks soon, instead of next week. This will help medical providers schedule appointments later in the future.
Krager said more vaccination options will become available as the vaccine supply arrives. Public health continues to match people with health care providers for immunization, but is working on more than 20,000 pending vaccine requests.
According to state data, Clark County has so far administered more than 21,000 doses of the vaccine.
“The good news is that we are preparing to be able to administer a large number of vaccines as soon as they arrive in the state,” Jenks said. “The bad news is that we must have disappointed a lot of people this week. . “
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