BOTS SCAN TO SECURE VACCINE DATES
Tech-savvy coders tap Twitter to navigate S.D. appointment sites
With vaccine demand outpacing supply, securing an appointment can be migraine-inducing. But a few software experts have developed automated Twitter accounts to help.
These accounts, known as bots, regularly scan to see if appointments are available — and, if so, how many, where and when — before tweeting out that information.
Behind the lines of code are people like Andre Le, a Google employee who lives in Manhattan but was born and raised in an immigrant family in City Heights. Le’s relatives still live here, and he quickly learned how difficult it was to find a vaccine appointment while trying to help them from afar.
“San Diego’s sites are quite confusing. It’s text heavy. You can kind of go into a loop where they tell you to click on this link, it goes to another thing, it goes into another form,” Le said. “If I couldn’t understand it as someone who works in software, there’s no way
that my family would.”
Le realized something else. If his family was confused, that meant other people were, too.
So he created a Twitter bot known as the San Diego COVID Vaccine Bot (@CovaxSd), which scans every five to 10 minutes for appointments at sites run by Sharp HealthCare.
Nearly 3,000 miles away and on the opposite side of the country, Omar Darwish was doing the same thing. The Bay Area security engineer, who works for a tech company, designed his Twitter bot for California’s MyTurn notification and appointment scheduling system (MyTurn.ca.gov).
“If I could figure out how that one website works, it becomes pretty easy to write something that continuously checks what appointments are available,” Darwish said. “You can tailor it to what specific location within California you’re interested in.”
That’s precisely what he did, which led to the creation of the San Diego Vaccine Bot (@CovidVaccineSD). Darwish also has created bots for locations in the Bay Area and Los Angeles that schedule through MyTurn.
Eventually, all of Sharp’s sites will go through MyTurn, including the Chula Vista and La Mesa superstations, according to a spokesperson. On Monday, the health system announced that it is helping run the mass immunization site at Cal State University San Marcos in partnership with Palomar Health, replacing Tri-City Medical Center, which had a team of seven staffers at the location.
The state and health insurance company Blue Shield are requiring vaccine sites to use MyTurn in a bid to centralize data reporting and better track how quickly doses are going into arms. That includes the region’s newest vaccine location, run by the county in partnership with San Diego State University at Viejas Arena. The walk-up site, which runs from Tuesday to Saturday each week, will soon be able to immunize 1,500 San Diegans a day — depending on supply.
County officials expect a 10 percent supply increase this week compared with last week. San Diego received around 90,000 doses that week, meaning that 99,000 doses could flow into the region in the coming days. None of those doses will be from Johnson & Johnson, the only vaccine maker with authorization for a oneshot vaccine. More vaccine from the pharma giant won’t arrive until next week, according to county spokesperson Mike Workman. On Monday, the county reported 189 new coronavirus infections and zero deaths. A drop in testing accounts in part for the low number of cases; the county reported 4,928 test results, less than 40 percent of testing volume from a month ago. The number of San Diegans in the hospital with COVID-19 has dropped by a similar fraction during that time (663 to 226), as the pandemic’s impact on the health care system continues to lessen.
Experts say it’ll take widespread vaccination to cement those gains, and county officials hope to have 1.9 million San Diegans inoculated by July 1.
With only around 500,000 residents fully immunized, that means Le and Darwish have plenty of work left to do. That work didn’t stop after debuting their automated accounts a few weeks ago. Updating the software has kept them busy, as even slight changes in vaccine booking systems can trigger errors in their code.
It’s a full-time job for two people who already have one. But they say they’re driven to help as many people as possible, and they’ve been touched by the responses they’ve gotten.
“The feedback has been overwhelming,” Le said. “People have said, ‘I’ve been looking for weeks, and I couldn’t find it. And within hours, I followed this account and I got an appointment.’ ”
And if you want to thank them, Darwish says, just do one thing — get your shot.
“That’s all I ask,” he said. “For benevolent and selfish reasons, I want the pandemic to end.”