Clark County residents continue to struggle with the online system for making COVID-19 vaccination appointments at the Clark County Event Center at the Fairgrounds in Ridgefield.
On Sunday afternoon, a new batch of appointments became available online, but dozens of residents said they were kicked out of the appointment portal or experienced the website crashing, according to emails and calls The Columbian received, as well as a Monday community briefing hosted by Clark County Public Health.
The forum, streamed on Facebook, was organized to help answer residents’ questions about vaccine allocation and where to get vaccinated, but questions surrounding issues with the appointment portal still remain.
The mass vaccination site at the fairgrounds is run by the Washington State Department of Health. Safeway/Alberstons has been administering vaccine at the fairgrounds, along with the U.S. National Guard.
Clark County Public Health is not involved in the fairgrounds site or the appointment portal.
Lauren Jenks, who represented the Department of Health at the forum, said she knew the website crashed the first time, but was unaware of the most recent crash.
“That is super frustrating,” Jenks said.
Jill McGinnis, director of communications and public affairs with Safeway/Albertsons, said their pharmacy team was not aware of crashes or glitches with the appointment portal, but acknowledged the website has seen heavy traffic once appointments are made available.
Safeway/Albertsons does not operate the portal. McGinnis said it’s run by a third-party vendor called Kordinator. McGinnis said a Safeway/Albertsons pharmacy team will contact Kordinator to let it know about the problems.
She said Safeway/Albertsons has no plans to stop vaccinating soon, and stressed that patience will be key as the number of people eligible for vaccination right now is much greater than available vaccine supply.
Other vaccination sites planned
While Public Health is not involved in the site near Ridgefield, it continues to work with an incident management team to prepare the county’s vaccination infrastructure for increased vaccine supply.
The county plans to have multiple larger-scale vaccination sites, in addition to mobile vaccination clinics that can vaccinate people in adult family homes and also larger essential workplaces such as food processing plants.
At the moment, it’s hard to roll out these options because of how limited vaccine supply is. Last week, a majority of the county’s vaccines went to the fairgrounds. In total, 3,060 vaccines were administered at the fairgrounds last week, easily surpassing the state’s goal of 500 vaccinations per day.
There are factors limiting the county’s ability to administer vaccine at the moment. Vaccine supply is still much lower than the number of people eligible for the vaccine, according to Clark County Deputy Health Officer Dr. Steven Krager.
“There’s just not enough vaccine to go around right now,” Krager said. “We are administering as fast as we can, but we just don’t have enough. Hopefully that will change in the future.”
For this week, the state requested more than 358,000 vaccine doses from the federal government, which means Washington vaccination clinics, health care providers and pharmacies felt they had the capacity to administer around 358,000 vaccine doses this week.
The state, however, only received 107,000 vaccine doses from the federal government, leaving it well short of that capacity. There are about 1.7 million Washingtonians eligible for the vaccine right now.
Clark County is generally receiving somewhere close to 4,000 doses per week, but the county has anywhere from 50,000 to 75,000 people eligible at the moment.
It is expected that vaccine supply will increase at least a little in the near future, which should help some. The state is also expecting the federal government to soon give notice of vaccine allocation for the upcoming three weeks, instead of just the upcoming week. That will help medical providers schedule appointments further into the future.
Krager said that more options for vaccination will become available as more vaccine supply arrives. Public Health continues to pair people with health care providers for vaccination, but they are working through more than 20,000 pending requests for vaccine.
According to state data, Clark County has administered more than 21,000 vaccine doses so far.
“The good news is we’re gearing up so we are going to be able to give a whole lot of vaccine as it comes into the state,” Jenks said “The bad news is we had to disappoint a whole lot of people this week.”
