FULL-COURT PRESS FOR UC VACCINES
Many left frustrated after crushing rush to nab one of 110,000 appointments for COVID shots leads to busy signals, long hold times, disconnected calls and website glitches
Alicia Martinez spent 1½ hours on hold Thursday trying to book a COVID-19 vaccine appointment for her partner at the United Center.
Then, at last, a human voice answered. Martinez had just finished giving the woman on the line her partner’s date of birth when she got disconnected.
“I was angry, I was upset. I was everything,” said Martinez, who is 67 and lives in Berwyn.
Martinez wasn’t alone in her frustration — a fact city officials acknowledged Thursday as they began to book appointments for what is by far the largest mass vaccination site in town.
“Some people weren’t able to get through immediately, a sign of how much demand there is for appointments,” said Dr. Allison Arwady, head of the Chicago Department of Public Health, during a COVID-19 Q&A on Facebook Live.
The online problems that surfaced with the 8:30 a.m. launch appeared to have been resolved by late morning and by the afternoon many walk-up appointments were listed on the site, although those booked up within a few hours.
Arwady said the website was fielding about 24,000 hits per minute when it first opened, and within a few hours of launching, a “huge rush of people” had booked up all drive-thru appointments for the month of March.
By 3 p.m., a total of 27,819 appointments had been booked out of the 110,000-plus made available, officials said.
During a town hall event hosted by AARP Illinois, Dr. Rachel Bernard, the medical director of the CDPH’s COVID response bureau, noted that “tens of thousands” of walk-up appointments were still available.
For those who tried to use the phone, it was difficult to get through all day. Several attempts by the Sun-Times to call the phone number provided were met with busy signals earlier in the day. Later, hold times were long, although one call went through in about 35 minutes Thursday evening.
The city has reassigned 200 COVID-19 contact tracers to help bolster the call center taking United Center appointments.
“Especially early on, there were some people getting busy signals,” Arwady said. “The system can handle about 600 calls at any one moment, but keep calling. There are appointments, and we’ll work to get folks in.”
A spokesperson for Zocdoc, the company the city is using to make the appointments, acknowledged the early online glitches but said they were resolved in less than 30 minutes.
“We continue to actively monitor the service and our systems to deliver a smooth booking experience for Illinois residents,” the company said in a statement. “We apologize to everyone who was affected early this morning, and we look forward to helping more eligible individuals find and book a COVID-19 vaccine appointment.”
Martinez said it took her about 4½ hours in total to book an appointment for her partner, who has a lung condition and heart problems. It was, she said, an ordeal that left her in tears.
“Horrible,” is the word she used to describe it. She managed to get her partner an appointment for 9:30 a.m. March 10.
To register, go to zocdoc.com/vaccine, or call (312) 746-4835. Call centers will be open 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday. With the huge demand for appointments, officials urge people to use the online signup if possible.
If any appointments are still available by 4 p.m. Sunday, people 16 or older with chronic health conditions will be eligible to start taking those spots.
The first shots will go into arms outside the United Center site Tuesday. The Federal Emergency Management Agency will administer about 6,000 doses per day in tents set up in the parking lot northeast of the stadium.
During Thursday’s town hall, Dr. Bernard also advised seniors to seek out appointments through their employers or doctors, as well as major pharmacy chains, like CVS and Walgreens.
The city’s health department is also offering at-home inoculations to some seniors, though Bernard acknowledged that it could take a month or two for the city to send a paramedic to administer a vaccine dose. To see if you qualify, fill out the vaccine survey on the CDPH’s website at
Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced Thursday that his administration will partner with hospitals and health care centers in targeted areas for a COVID-19 vaccine pilot program in order to better reach underserved communities across the state that have “too often been denied health care that should be their right.”
Five federally qualified health centers and four safety net hospitals scattered around the state were chosen for the pilot program, including facilities in the south, north and western suburbs.
Pritzker unveiled the new partnership Thursday at one of the southern Illinois locations, Touchette Regional Hospital in Centreville, which has been ranked the poorest city in the state — and the nation — in previous years.
“We have to meet people where they are, in the ways that will truly earn their trust,” Pritzker said. “We also want to be sure that we’re getting vaccines to Black and Brown people who have, too often, been denied health care that should be their right.”
Starting next week, those hospitals and health centers will receive “hundreds of doses per week” directly from the Illinois Department of Public Health for patients, Pritzker said.
State Sen. Chris Belt, D-Cahokia, said the partnership will not only help with access to the vaccine but also “the trust needed to reduce the residents’ fear and resistance and reluctance to receive the vaccine.”
“The faster we get these shots in the arm, the quicker we can have some level of normalcy,” said Belt, whose Senate district includes Touchette Hospital.
“These additional vaccines that will be here at Touchette Hospital, that’s huge in communities like Centreville, where, in 2018, the USA Today deemed [it] the poorest city not in Illinois but in the United States,” Belt said. “Having a place in the neighborhood, in the community where residents can go to get these shots, would be huge and beneficial.”
The vaccines provided through the pilot program will supplement doses already allocated to local area health departments thanks to a Biden administration program designed to deliver additional vaccines to qualifying health centers and hospitals.
The administration has increased the country’s vaccine supply, and Pritzker said he expects availability to “soar in the coming weeks,” which could help the state get to 100,000 vaccine doses per day by mid-March, the governor said.
“I can speak for everybody standing with me today in saying this: This is tremendously welcome news, and it truly can’t come soon enough,” Pritzker said.
So far, the state has administered over 3 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine, Pritzker said. More than 20% of people who are 16 or older, and 44% of residents 65 and older, have been vaccinated so far.
Along with Touchette in the state’s Metro East area, others participating in the pilot program include Family Christian Health Center, which has sites in Harvey, Dolton and Lynwood; Chicago Behavioral Hospital in Des Plaines; AMITA Health Adventist Medical Center in Lisle; Lake County Health Department and its federally qualified site; Community Health Care Inc. in the Quad Cities area; Crossing Healthcare in central Illinois; and Rural Health Inc. and SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital in southern Illinois.