Well either we're a relatively efficient way to find vaccine or a very inefficient way to find horse hospitals. Currently up to three.
New interview question for PMs: "Suppose you have nothing but a California phone book but have no metadata about institutions. Describe a way to find all the horse hospitals."
Small brain: grep for horse hospital
Big brain: call all the hospitals, ask about horses.
Galaxy brain: convince VaccinateCA there is a non-zero chance a horse hospital would get a shipment of covid-19 vaccine, then just ask nicely "So can I get a list of horse hospitals."
"Is there a non-zero chance a horse hospital would get a shipment?"
Oh of course there is. We probably wouldn't prioritize them if we knew ahead of time given higher return on calls elsewhere, but if we had infinite calls, absolutely we would call every horse hospital.
"Is this a time to be joking?"
Not joking at all.
Veterinary workers are considered healthcare workers in California. Citation: cvma.net/wp-content/upl…
The math follows very quickly from there.
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Wowza now is this an interesting business model: HP "Instant Ink."
In lieu of selling you ink and having you own the ink, we will sell you the thing you actually want, which is printing capacity. We will forward-deploy some compute and chemicals at your printer to fulfill this.
Some geeks are going to *hate* this but it's almost obviously good?
"Patrick why would a consumer ever want that."
Among many other things, because it allows a capital stack arbitrage similar to how consumers get very cheap access to cell phones without owning "cell phone ink."
HP can use your commitment to print in future to fund printer, etc.
There's a particular counterparty in Tokyo who has behaved abominably recently.
X: "So that's the reason we can't do that thing."
"You said differently."
X: "You might have misunderstood."
"We have a contract which specifies what happens here."
X: "We... do. But says opposite."
"I have the contract in front of me. Would you like me to read it aloud to you, and you can explain to me what you think you agreed to."
X: "... You'll have to come in to discuss this."
"I am too busy to do so, but will send my lawyer at a time convenient to you."
X: "... You don't have a lawyer."
"Sir I want you to reflect on your long experience working in Tokyo and answer me this question. If a salaryman tells you that he is at the point of involving his lawyer, IS HE EVER BLUFFING."
One of the more important things to happen for VaccinateCA.com was @jain_ankit (CEO of Infinitus.ai) dropping by, very early in the project, asking how they could help.
They generously donated the use of Eva, their digital assistant. She is *magic* for us.
Eva is, effectively, Amazon Alexa but capable of pushing buttons on a telephone and following simple instructions.
We ask her to go through a long list of pharmacies and ask a simple screening question: "Do you have the vaccine?"
Professionals follow up on all the Yeses.
We are acutely constrained by the number of phone calls we can place per day. Medical providers are acutely constrained right now by their own time in answering phones (trading off with patient care).
Eva saves us from having to make thousands of futile calls.
The only California post code I know off the top of my head is 90210, which is probably not optimal from a testing perspective, but I still am encouraged every time I see the map filling in.
Red pins are where a healthcare professional told us Yes.
Blue pins are supersites.
We are finding about 20 new locations a day. That growth has slowed to what I think is probably close to the rate of growth in ground truth (for pharmacies); after ~7.5k calls we can't simply call new pharmacies we haven't heard of yet.
Here's what VaccinateCA.com did on Day 18 (Sunday) to help Californians get accurate information to access the coronavirus vaccines.
* We called hundreds of pharmacies across the state to talk to pharmacists about how to get the vaccine, and wrote down what they said.
* We substantially finished QA on our initial multilingualizations of the site into Spanish and Chinese, and expect to push them live today.
We will continue moving to support linguistic communities in California. We're working on other accessibility improvements, too.
* We continued scoping work on a next set of institutions to target for calls, since we seem to be running out of pharmacies that we think we could call productively, on a daily basis. (We use a Markov model to estimate chance they've had a change in ground truth since last call)