Vaccine Vaudeville

People attempting to sign up for the COVID vaccine online find themselves confronted with a maze of widely differing procedures and forms to complete depending on  where they live and which websites they visit. The reason for the confusion is described in the following excerpt from an article from Science News.

Click here to read the full article.

Why is it so hard to get a vaccine?
Vaccine distribution in the United States has been plagued with problems. Not only are limited doses available to people in currently eligible groups but everyone who gets Moderna’s or Pfizer’s vaccines needs two shots for full protection (SN: 12/3/20).

The logistical issues also come in part because each state — sometimes down to the county or town level — is handling the situation in their own way, Barry Bloom, an immunologist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said January 28 in a call with journalists. Who is even eligible for the shots varies from place to place, causing confusion and frustration. Such a local response “is very difficult to coordinate, which I think is a real tragedy and a hindrance to knowing exactly where the vaccines are needed, exactly how many doses should go, which vaccines they have the facilities for,” Bloom said

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After many attempts and much frustration, I was able to figure out a way to navigate that maze and thereby to receive my first shot. I am a computer geek, so I sent an email to a number of friends here in Ohio offering to help them sign up for the vaccine online if they were having difficulty.

Several friends called, and I helped them get signed up. Today, however, a help session turned into...

A COVID Comedy of Errors

My friend Tom called me with questions about how he could help his daughter register for the vaccine. I asked him if he was at his computer, and he said he was. I wanted to mirror his progress in following my instructions, so I directed him to the Ohio Department of Health's Coronavirus website and called up the same link on my computer. The website shows a map of the State of Ohio covered with 970 blue dots, one for every vaccination location in the state. 

In order to show him how to reconfigure the map to display only the vaccine administration locations in a specific part of the state, I asked Tom for his daughter's Zip Code.

To this, he replied, "Marietta's Zip Code is 43220."

I carefully entered 43220 into the search field on the web page, expecting to see blue dots near Marietta, Ohio located on the Ohio River. The map however reconfigured to show three blue dots in the northwest corner of Franklin County, which is smack dab in the middle of Ohio and definitely not on the Ohio River.

I said, "Something's wrong, Tom. 43220 is not the Zip Code for Marietta, Ohio."

Tom laughed and said, "Marietta is my daughter. She lives right here in Columbus."

Moral: Even during a pandemic funny things happen to computer geeks.

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Obligatory Political Comment: You can blame Donald Trump's failure to create a national response to the COVID-19 pandemic for the mess described in the "Science News" article referenced at the top of this post.