Demand crashes site for vaccine registration

Washington Health System went live Monday morning with its COVID-19 vaccine registry, offering online appointments for people over age 65 and younger if they have chronic health problems.

Then the health system’s webpage stalled until well into the afternoon as a crush of people jammed the site to sign up. It wasn’t a surprise. The health system had anticipated that, President and CEO Brook Ward said in a video message released early Monday.

“We fully expect the website to crash,” Mr. Ward said in a weekly video update for residents of Washington and Greene counties. “We expect that to happen during the first week. We’re going to be overwhelmed, we realize that.”

In fact, its experience has become common among health care systems and pharmacies as health care providers face stiff demand from people eager to gain protection from the highly infectious disease amid tight supplies of the serum.

Pennsylvania has no centralized registry for people who want to get in line for the shots, so county health departments, hospitals and pharmacies have each developed their own sign-up websites — often with their own rules about who is eligible. And that sends an even heavier load toward the health systems with the broadest eligibility criteria, like WHS.

And people in other parts of the country and the world are also hunting down COVID-19 vaccines.

Washington Health System had received inquiries about the vaccine from as far away as South Carolina, New York state, Illinois — even the Dominican Republic, Mr. Ward said.

WHS, which received 1,950 doses of vaccine from the federal government on Jan. 19, will be vaccinating people at its hospitals in Washington and Greene counties. About 80,000 people will be eligible for the shots in Washington and another 10,000 people in Greene, Mr. Ward said. The shots are limited to residents of those two counties.

The health system plans to move its vaccine operations to the sprawling Washington Crown Center Mall in North Franklin on Feb. 18 and open another center in Peters on Feb. 22.

Shots will also be available at Washington Health System Greene in Waynesburg.

Mr. Ward said the health system was blindsided by the state Department of Health’s decision Jan. 19 to expand the eligibility rules for the first wave of vaccinations to include people age 65 and over and those ages 16-64 with chronic health problems.

WHS already had a full vaccination schedule before the change in eligibility criteria, he said.

The state made the changes to meet federal guidelines.

“We were preparing for that, but we were not ready,” Mr. Ward said.

Heritage Valley Health System encountered similar problems when it opened vaccine registrations to residents of its service area Jan. 22.

HVHS, which operates three hospitals in Beaver and Allegheny counties, is focusing on people age 65 and older and those under 65 with chronic health problems who live in its service area, which includes parts of Allegheny, Beaver and Lawrence counties.

Heritage Valley Health System has been giving the shots at the Community College of Beaver County campus in Monaca.

Since opening its signups a little more than a week ago, more than 39,000 people have registered, spokeswoman Suzanne Sakson said, with the website slowing to a crawl until the health system moved it to a bigger server.

“We got crushed,” Ms. Sakson said.

Western Pennsylvania’s health care giants, UPMC and Highmark’s Allegheny Health Network, have not begun vaccinating people age 65 and older. UPMC has limited shots to health care workers and nursing home residents while Allegheny Health Network temporarily shut down its vaccine registration site Jan. 21.

Lee Taddonio, a retired Republican legislator who represented Monroeville and Murrysville in the state House of Representatives for 10 years, is among the many Western Pennsylvania residents who have been frustrated by the vaccine shortages and bumpy rollout of the state’s distribution plan.

“It’s clearly not organized,” said Mr. Taddonio, who lives in Murrysville.

“When this thing started in March, they knew this was going to happen. Why wasn’t anyone planning? We know a lot of people who are frantic.”