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.
And so we call pharmacies because, if this were a game and not a matter of life and death, "call all the pharmacies you can find, particularly ones which have patterned logistics systems" is so much more effective than intellectually richer strategies it would be called cheating.
This gets next to a lot of issues which require much more societal consideration than my addled thoughts after a very long day, but I feel I have to say this explicitly:
People can perceive either a lot of difficulty, or relatively little difficulty, in the search for a vaccine for reasons which probably strike our intuitions as being arbitrary.
One such axis that distinguishes difficulty: do you quickly land on this as your individual strategy.
We will try to write something more considered than this for vaccine seekers. Ultimately we want to take the skill out of this equation by having a system up-skill people to success, but for the moment, we'll settle for "Distribute the skill more widely by writing it down."
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Yesterday, Los Angeles County approved distribution of vaccines to people over the age of 65.
Vaccinate CA began calling pharmacies yesterday afternoon. Many had not yet achieved institutional clarity required to administer the vaccine.
This morning, we had a small team quickly call several pharmacies in Los Angeles as soon as they opened. Many had achieved institutional clarity overnight, and were now administering the vaccine.
We immediately surged much of today's call capacity over Los Angeles.
This contributed to discovering and listing 60 new locations which could actually administer the vaccine today, bringing the total number of places where we can recommend someone try to get the vaccine or get an available appointment to 216.
VaccinateCA.com calls medical professionals daily to ask who they could vaccinate and how to get in line. We publish this, covering the entire state of California, to help more people get their vaccines faster. Please tell your friends and networks.
If you work in government, we would like to help you get the word out to your constituents. You can email partners@vaccinateca.com to discuss, or you can go ahead and point them at our website w/ no coordination required.
Media inquiries to media@vaccinateca.com
If you'd like to help, the single most helpful thing you can do of today is help people you know get vaccinated. Accessing the vaccine is difficult, and if you're reading this you are more likely to be successful than people you may know.
* Call a few hundred pharmacies. We are explicit looking for process errors between multiple parties that are causing shots to stay in boxes rather tan go in arms.
* If we identify those errors, we want to try repeating remote diagnosis and remediation of the error, by (for example) reporting it to the pharmacy chain, to the government, to the scheduling software vendor, etc etc. We don't know how effective we'll be, but this worked once.
* Work on supplementing our all-volunteer force of phone bankers with committed availability of professionals. Are views are evolving rapidly (again, we didn't exist 8 days ago), but we think volunteers working next to our engineers/etc help us learn and pros help us scale.
* 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."