COVID-19 vaccine booking site crashes
HALIFAX — An online booking system for COVID-19 vaccine shots is back up after it crashed not long after being launched Monday morning.
The Health Department said the company that manages the site, CanImmunize, alerted it to extremely high traffic after the site was launched.
The Health Department tweeted that the website (https://novascotia.flow. canimmunize.ca/en/c19vaccine) was back to normal Monday afternoon.
The province said last week it expected to vaccinate the roughly 48,000 Nova Scotians who are over 80 at 10 community clinics. MSI is sending letters to all Nova Scotians who were 80 years old as of March 1 with information about the clinics.
There have been 32,856 doses of COVID-19 vaccine administered in Nova Scotia. Of those, 12,845 people have received their second dose.
Earlier Monday, a SaltWire Network reader emailed to say he'd been able to book an online appointment in the morning. But others on social media reported they couldn't get through either online (before the site had been taken down) or through the phone line.
Stephen Shaw, who just turned 80, said he began trying to get through online at about noon on Monday. He said at about 2:30 p.m., the website message changed from "try again later" to advisories about possible wait times. Those times have ranged from 134 minutes to 20 minutes.
"I imagine they’ve built an algorithm that looks at how many people who were going to get in line and multiplied it by a number," said Shaw, who lives near Chocolate Lake outside Halifax, in a phone interview at about 3:30 p.m.
Shaw said he was not surprised the website crashed after it was launched Monday morning.
"They want to vaccinate people, we want to get vaccinated. I’m just guessing, but I presume over 20 per cent of the population are over 80, maybe it’s less than that. What the hell happens when you get into the 50 year olds, you know, there’s a much bigger bunch of people. Nova Scotia’s population is 0.98 million and they can’t even run a website like this it seems."