Thread by @patio11

It's Day 60 of VaccinateCA.com and it's a big day, but most important news first:

Today we called hundreds of pharmacies looking for the covid-19 vaccine and eligibility criteria, and published what we learned.

Tomorrow, March 15th, is the largest expansion of eligibility for California yet, to include workers in several industries plus individuals with pre-existing conditions which would place them at elevated risk.

This substantially increases the count of people eligible.

Describing eligibility in a tweet is hard so a sneak peek: vaccinateca.com/checklist ; we're publishing a tool tomorrow to help vaccine seekers (and people managing care for others) easily navigate the decision tree.

The tool asks questions most people likely know about their employment / health status and outputs eligibility (which is on a spectrum now, from Yes to Maybe to Probably Not), next steps, and a guide on preparing for the vaccination appointment.

A PSA, which we're writing prominently in our guides: the state has directed medical providers to _not_ inquire about the specifics for pre-existing conditions. Patients will sign generic attestations that they're at elevated risk. No doctor's note or similar should be required.

We anticipate, and indeed have anecdotal evidence of, on-the-ground patient experiences which do not match what the state believes the policy to be, and will be working to quickly collect ground truth and report it to policymakers.

One of the benefits of having Dangerous Professional friends is that we were able to get our guides, which are partly pre-written and partly filled from our data set, checked by the medical reviewer for a biotech startup.

In other vaccination news, MyTurn ( myturn.ca.gov ), the statewide* scheduling website, has started to offer appointments to people with pre-existing conditions. We have multiple reports of successfully scheduling those appointments using the tool.

* "It's complicated"

We continue to gather data on practices of individual locations and chains, because it allows us to continue helping patients navigate to accessible vaccine close to them.

We are bringing on two call centers tomorrow to deal with rapid changes in availability and, we suspect, not-formally-intended variable time delay in rollout of the new criteria.

These call centers offer us a ~5X increase in call capacity. We'll certainly be able to keep them busy for the next few days. After that, we'll have to find some productive use for those calls.

We're also continuing to work on getting our data into the hands of patients and care managers, via a variety of mechanisms.

It's been a very busy two months.

Our society is not yet near the end of the covid-19 pandemic. The next few months are critical. A lot is going right at the moment, but much can yet go wrong, and we are still are not moving fast enough.

As a project, we're working as fast as we can.

The quicker shots make it into arms, the more marginal lives are saved, the quicker daily life gets back to normal, and the quicker the US's substantial resources and talents can be redirected to solving the pandemic globally.