Here's what VaccinateCA.com did on Day 8 to get more Californians access to the coronavirus vaccine.
* We called hundreds of pharmacies across the state, looking for the vaccine.
* We published what the medical professionals told us, within 5 minutes of learning it.
* We confirmed previous availability had not changed at some locations, using a fraction of our calling capacity. We are working on the balance between refreshing information and finding new information by observing rate of change in status between calls to a single location.
* We redesigned our county-level detail pages to make them more accessible on mobile devices, since many of our users use them.
* We wireframed a redesign, for implementation soon, of how we present our results, so that they are more easy to understand.
Day 8 isn't over yet; there is still some planning to be done as to what we do on Day 9.
We're working on figuring out how to make this pace sustainable for our team members, and how to accelerate how quickly we as a project are able to impact this problem.
Every day matters. Every shot matters.
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Trying to balance the competing emotions of “I need to read as a trustworthy professional more than I ever have in my life right now” and and “I think we are building an MMORPG where you get XP by finding the coronavirus vaccine and getting in the hands of people who need it.”
I am, by agreement with my wife, banned from ever playing an MMORPG again, because they push my buttons too well.
But this one, this one seems like not that bad to be obsessive about. (Shouldn’t someone care maybe a little too much about whether there are free doses out there?)
A story from my WoW guild leader days, by the way:
When things are going wrong on a raid, it’s everyone’s fault but yours. “Raging” at others is common. It is emotionally satisfying. It killed no dragons, ever, not one single time.
Here's what VaccinateCA.com got done on Day 9 to help more Californians quickly find the coronavirus vaccine where it is actually accessible.
* Medical professionals at ~20 locations told us they had the coronavirus vaccine. We wrote down what they said and published.
* We completed all work required to have professionals call approximately 40 medical professionals an hour on Monday looking for the coronavirus vaccine. We'll write down what they say, too. This is "committed" call capacity; it doesn't fluctuate as much as our volunteers do.
* We are putting finishing touches on a method of pre-screening lead lists (e.g. "a list of all the pharmacies in the state of California") into highly-likely-to-have-the-vaccine and not-very-likely sublists, without human intervention.
* Call hundreds of pharmacies across California, looking for the coronavirus vaccine, so we can help people find it reliably by looking in one place.
* Explore, with an eye towards implementing by Day 12, requirements for increasing our call capacity by several hundred calls per day. This will be "committed" capacity, rather than relying solely on our volunteers being able to pencil in calls around their lives.
* Implement a redesigned experience for how we explain results about a vaccine location, to make them more easily comprehensible. Many people seeking the vaccine are not experts about getting vaccinated; they shouldn't have to be.
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.