Tweet

Patrick McKenzie

24 Jan, 9 tweets, 2 min read

Here's what VaccinateCA.com got done yesterday, Day 10:

* We called several hundred pharmacies across California, asking pharmacists under what circumstances they could vaccinate. We publish their answers. We've made ~2.5k calls total in 10 days to 1.6k locations.

* We found 35 new vaccination locations with the vaccine available and published the instructions for getting in line, including eligibility criteria and appointment scheduling instructions, to our site. We have almost 300 locations with availability on the site now.

@malthe

* We announced the CEO internally (it's me). We announced a head of product/design (@malthe) and a website tech lead internally. We'll continue clarifying organizational structure so our volunteers have clear lines of communication to maximize for impact of their work.

* We continued calibrating the collaboration between our volunteers, our real-time queue management leader (we still don't have a name for this position), our data science team, and our pre-qualification efforts.

What does that mean for the mission? It means that, for our sharply limited call capacity as of Day 10 and 11, we waste less calls which will be futile (e.g. to a location we "should have known" would have no vaccine, based on emerging knowledge we have high confidence about).

This means that, for a given amount of volunteer time and other resourcing, we should discover more vaccine and particularly more overlooked vaccine, allowing us to publish instructions on how to get it and accelerate it's journey into the arms of Californians who need it *now.*

Stay tuned for what we plan to do on today, Day 11. I've been so deep in organizational things that I am not entirely sure what various workstreams are prioritizing at the moment. We're definitely getting to the point where meetings would be helpful.

Are we moving fast enough? No. It is impossible to move fast enough in a pandemic.

But we are accelerating, and unlike the enemy, we can work on accelerating faster with purpose and intensity.

We are an extremely small part of society's response effort, but we will do our part to the utmost of our ability. Every day matters. Every dose matters.

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More from @patio11

Patrick McKenzie

@patio11

25 Jan

Here's what VaccinateCA.com got done today, Day 11. (Technically speaking I know day is over in California but work hasn't stopped in Tokyo yet.)

* We made several hundred calls (near our peak to date) to pharmacists across California, and wrote down what they said.

* We added 60 net new locations with the vaccine, plus the instructions their dispensing pharmacists indicated would allow one to get an appointment and any eligibility criteria required. This brings us to about 320 we know of.

* We re-called many places to check for changes.

* We did major work on a Brand Identity Toolkit, so that the experience of using our project is consistent across the site and the other various presences we will soon have. We'll be cutting over to the new branding over the next few days.

Read 13 tweets

Patrick McKenzie

@patio11

24 Jan

Here is what VaccinateCA.com wants to get done today, Day 11, to help Californians arrange the covid-19 vaccine for themselves or their loved ones.

* We are going to call hundreds of pharmacies across California, talk to the pharmacist, and write down what they tell us.

* We are going to publish that information to a single website, including (where appropriate) the links and instructions we heard from the pharmacist for scheduling appointments.

* We're putting a way to quickly go from our search results to Google Maps so that vaccine searchers can prioritize which location they call based on e.g. their mobility capabilities, availability of transport, convenience to places they know, etc.

Read 8 tweets

Patrick McKenzie

@patio11

24 Jan

I find this sort of thing extremely heartening.

(Posted with approval from the VaccinateCA.com volunteer.)

Every dose matters. Every day matters.

Every bug we can fix in the system, every dose we find in a freezer, every overly complicated instruction we simplify, directly results in more moments like this.

@rajbot

And this wouldn’t be possible without @rajbot and our other volunteers on the phones. While one could imagine a fully automated solution to the siloed data problem, and I hope the folks working on them have every success, this way we learn 1000X faster and had less lead time.

Read 4 tweets

Patrick McKenzie

@patio11

23 Jan

It's Day 10 of VaccinateCA.com Here's what we plan to do today:

* We will onboard many new volunteers, to help us make a few hundred calls to pharmacies, to write down and distribute what their healthcare professionals say about the availability of the vaccine.

* We're continuing to work on call queue prioritization, particularly regarding the mix of new locations (on which we have no data), locations where our last call is getting older, and locations which we've pre-sorted to be likely yeses (of which, I just called two myself).

* We're going to start updating our visual presence and some indicia of credibility, both to help vaccine seekers know that we're professionals writing down information told to us by medical professionals, and to make other stakeholders more comfortable with us.

Read 8 tweets

Patrick McKenzie

@patio11

23 Jan

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.

Teamwork and preparation killed dragons.

Read 7 tweets

Patrick McKenzie

@patio11

23 Jan

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.

This is really important for efficiency.

Read 8 tweets

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