You know the sales team tradition of banging a gong when you get a commit?
We've got a gong bot that flags every time we find accessible vaccine.
I like this gong so much. (That it is not audible is a plus.)
Also like the emergent culture of people reacting to it with the :vaccine: emoji.
It's fundamentally the same purpose as the sales gong, right?
You're going to get told No, a lot. That's a useful result! Pick up the phone immediately and try to get some more Noes. Occasionally you get a Yes in there. *gong*
"How is No a useful result?"
In addition to morale management: For finding the vaccine specifically, we can find *patterns* in Nos, very very quickly, and use that to re-task upcoming queued calls, such that more of the limited number we'll do today discover a Yes.
"What kind of crazy machine learning are we talking about here?"
A: "Hey I have talked to 4 of $CHAIN in $COUNTY and all of them say $COUNTY won't let them release it yet."
B: "3 here."
Should you allocate another 50 calls to second guess those 7 pharmacists on their policy?
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I keep making a lot more references to pharmacies than other places to get vaccines, both internally and externally, and it's for a relatively simple reason:
Many individual users, at this stage in the rollout, are *relatively* ambivalent about where they find the vaccine.
Starbucks knows that, at the margin, some people won't cross the street for a cup of coffee.
That is decisively not true of everyone seeking the vaccine. They will go quite a bit out of their way.
To satisfy one, you don't have to locate the most convenient possible dose.
We optimize (at least as of Day 6) for locating the *most* doses with limited resources and attention, because we believe that likely optimizes for the most shots in arms, or is a good enough approximation to defer more complicated thinking until later.
* We called several hundred pharmacies today.
* We believe we directly caused 30-50 doses of the vaccine to be introduced into circulation at "many" pharmacies. We will not know an exact count for a day or two; I suspect 10+ in bag.
(10+ *pharmacies* of supply activated.)
* We have begun planning for what other patches we can do to quickly bring more supply online. Every. Dose. Counts.
* We worked on, but did not complete, prototypes of a much better UX.
* We appear to be greatly increasing in adoption.
I'm too tired to pull numbers but a representative anecdote, from the person managing most of the sysadmin-flavored things, was "At the exact minute 4:59 PT to 5:00 PT we had a 7X increase in traffic, and I believe that was Californians picking up their personal cell phone."
Up bright and early (joking, I live in Tokyo) to hit a Bay Area morning radio show and then work on day 6 of VaccinateCA.com
What we hope to do today:
* Call ~500 vaccine sites looking for up-to-the-minute availability. In particular, we want to probe who is not able to administer at present due to the batch which went bad, while finding who took or will take delivery today.
* Greatly improve the search experience, hopefully landing a prototype today and then rolling out today or tomorrow. You should be able to give us a few trivial facts about the vaccine seeker and get a prioritized list of recommendations.
Happy MLK Day. Here's what vaccinateCA.com hopes to accomplish today:
* Call ~500 pharmacies in California to learn their current status of vaccine availability.
* Improve website UX on mobile devices after relaunch on new tech stack at ~midnight.
* Continue learning nuances about pharmacy IVR systems to improve call efficiency, both for us and the responding pharmacist.
* Start scoping out multiple ways to expose our data, via e.g. a text-based interface, chatbot, etc, and APIs / ways to package for gov't frontline.