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.
If you'd like to work on any of these, or would like to make phone calls, drop me an email and I'll onboard you.
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Picked a pin at random to check for some formatting issues. I'm just struck by how we got this info just by asking nicely.
(I'm obscuring identifying information because this information will age rapidly; vaccinateCA.com will update but a Twitter screengrab will not.)
This is *not* the sort of petabyte scale computation that the tech industry often thinks of when we think data problem. It's a very, very human scale dataset.
But as we get good at ingesting updates rapidly, we can ask it useful questions, like "Where's nearest short waitlist?"
"But how will you go from unstructured text notes to something a computer can operate on? Spin up an ML team to do natural language parsing and then..."
No it probably sounds closer to "Read from computer, type into a computer, ideally very quickly."
So an interesting observation from vaccinateCA.com: we're effectively discovering availability bottom's up, starting from where the patient would perceive supply, rather than top down, starting from where a hypothetical national logistics coordinator would see supply.
That hypothetical coordinator might scratch their head at some of the results: "That's funny, I dispatched to X, Y, and Z on the same date. Why does X have it but Y and Z do not?"
We called ~80 pharmacies in California today to find one that had the vaccine available.
Seventy.
Luckily, we have a lot of dedicated people calling. If someone in your life can't do that many calls, point them at vaccinateCA.com to piggyback off our work.
My kingdom for an edit button, including after I fumble-fingered the domain name.
Anyhow, it isn't entirely obvious yet what is causing the low hit rate today. We're mixing in new pharmacy chains, and therefore supply lines, after completing the census of Safeways.
We also learned a fun new thing about pharmacy hours, which is that waking up bright and early at 8:30 AM on a Sunday means you get a 90 minute coffee break before you can actually talk to anyone.
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.
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.
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.