Representative examples of people who report this site got them a vaccine include an older person battling stage 4 cancer. This might be the highest leverage thing you can do on your phone this weekend.
We also appreciate help getting the word out about the site. Point people you know there, post to networks, suggest local likely-to-be-asked institutions add it to their standard "Ask your healthcare provider" language, etc.
It strikes me as extremely unfortunate that we have the largest publicly accessible database of fresh vaccine availability, and (I feel it distressingly likely) the largest one period, but be that as it may we'll hit a thousand calls faster than any actor and could use your help.
Calls aren't the point, obviously. Radically decreasing the barriers to shots-in-arms is the point. The system currently has low total supply but also localized supply/demand mismatch, and this helps to correct that over the next few days and then the next few weeks.
The best option for someone arranging shots for an older relative, in most of California, is currently to call 25 hospitals sequentially until they find one making appointments to administer the shot.
We can e.g. point them to a local fire department taking walk-ins, in seconds.
The shot isn't doing anything at the fire department right now but counting down the minutes until it can't save a life. Thus, the urgency here, and the urgency which all of civil society should be exerting upon the vaccine administration effort *everywhere.*
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Day 4 of VaccinateCA.com (we rebranded; we couldn't remember the old domain, either).
We're shooting for 500+ calls today. That should uncover another 50+ locations with the vaccine in California to go with the 100 we have already found.
We're also relaunching the site after a rewrite in a static site generator (to allow us to greatly improve the experience on mobile, 60~80% of clients).
ETA: a few hours into the day. We'll then launch a simplified experience where ~3 facts about patient => show best result.
We're still working on getting the word out. Please feel free to send the site to older folks in California or to your networks.
If you want to help with calling, and haven't already emailed me, please do. Onboarding volunteers throughout the day, between everything else.
We've now called about 700 California vaccine sites for covid19vaccineca.com and have 98 which are actively administering the vaccine, most of which require appointments.
We will probably ~2X those numbers by tomorrow.
Priorities for rest of the weekend:
1) Continue improving processes for contacting pharmacies.
2) Complete census of Safeway; prioritize CVS/Walgreens/etc based on observe hitrates.
3) Develop repeatable process for daily refresh on pharmacies, via humans or bots.
4) Outreach outreach outreach; we are getting to the point where we are better at data collection than getting data in front of people.
5) Improve usability on mobile; represents majority of clients.
I'm going to continue being heavily involved with covid19vaccineca.com updates the next few days (and if you need to mute me, no worries; back to normally scheduled SaaS advice and Bitcoin perfidy soonish.)
Last 3 hours: 150+ calls, ~30 locations w/ vaccines discovered.
We're getting an outrageously higher hit rate with Safeway than with any other subset of our calling operation, and will be pivoting efforts to complete our census of every Safeway in California and then add other pharmacy chains.
At current rate of improvement, I expect indicatively that we'll have contacted every pharmacy in California by Monday and have a process in place for daily updates at all of them shortly after that.
covid19vaccineca.com is tracking availability of the covid-19 vaccines in California. @ca_covid volunteers are calling hospitals/pharmacies to ask if they will administer to 65+ year olds.
We called 100+ Thursday and will do 500+ Friday. 24 sites confirmed; more to come.
We plan are calling daily to keep the availability information fresh. We plan to do this for as long as necessary.
Before: call 25+ hospitals, hope to eventually find a yes.
After: call one hospital that told us Yes. Ask how to schedule appointment and/or confirm availability.
This is entirely a volunteer effort. If you know me, and want to pitch in making some calls, drop me a line via DM or email. We have a Discord + Airtable based workflow and a script; it takes about 3-5 minutes for the typical call.
Bitfinex/Tether, who are one operation, are by far the largest customer of Deltec, and when their chief counsel was asked whether they are investors in the bank, they demurred with respect to Tether's investments specifically.
Bitfinex/Tether's last banking relationship was with a firm called Noble Markets. Noble's board had compliance concerns and was worried their custodian would terminate services if thy banked Tether.
Bitfinex lead round; got banked; used Noble like skin suit. No longer exists.
You could either do some sort of crowdsourcing or just say “Look, there’s a finite number of hospitals in San Francisco and they all have a phone number. I’m going to call them all at 9 AM and publish which ones say ‘Yes we could give a walk-in 65 year old a shot.’”
You can wait until the city of San Francisco holds a hearing to determine whether the committee in charge of transparency has... or you could implement this by 10 AM PST tomorrow.