FRUSTRATION ABOUNDS
Some managed to get an appointment for vaccine; others struck out
STAMFORD — Lisa Misakian knew that snagging a vaccine appointment would take tenacity on her part. What she didn’t expect was how long it would take.
“I’ve been telling all my friends in the New York how easy it seemed like it was going to be in Connecticut,” Misakian said. “I had chalked up all the earlier complaints to the fact that the older people may not be as comfortable with technology.”
March 1 presented her with a rude awakening.
Misakian bounced from the Stamford Health website to the state’s own COVID-19 page. She set early morning alarms and called the hospital’s appointment hotline five times. After nine hours of attempts, the 64-year-old stumbled on an April 1 appointment.
Technical errors, glitchy websites, and an onslaught of newly eligible residents flooded Stamford’s vaccine registration efforts starting at midnight. After a day of listlessly searching for an appointment, some are wondering whether the roll-out will ever get better.
Connecticut made more than 600,000 people eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine as of March 1, a group that included both adults 55 to 64 and K-12 educators. In Stamford alone,
about 17,000 more people could get vaccinated. And while expanded eligibility rolled in with the new month, that didn’t translate into immediate appointments for all.
“Our COVID-19 vaccine appointments are fully booked through the third week of March,” Stamford Health Spokesperson Andie Jodko told The Stamford Advocate in an email. “This was the case prior to the eligibility expansion.”
Stamford Health operates a vaccine clinic jointly with the city at the Bennett Medical Center campus and has “administered over 36,000 vaccines” so far. Along with Community Health Center, which operate a mass vaccine site in the Lord & Taylor parking lot at 110 High Ridge Road, the hospital administers a bulk of the vaccines for the city.
Jodko said, while appointment availability could remain low in the immediate future, more appointments would become available as the hospital receives more information on vaccine allocations from the state.
Even still, the idea of refreshing a website endlessly feels unfathomable to some.
“I just wish I knew when to check back instead of having to look at the websites every hour, every day, like I’m crazy or something,” said Kim Nguyen, 24, who spent much of Monday trying to book an appointment for her father, Thuan.
Thuan Nguyen is an electrician. Because of the in-person nature of that work, his daughter was determined to keep him safe by booking him an appointment. She turned to vaccinefinder.org — a website that aggregates all the vaccination sites in a region.
By the time Nguyen started clicking through the list of nearby sites at around 11 a.m., it seemed to be a lost cause. As of Monday afternoon, Nguyen had not hit gold. She was left feeling lost, jilted, and like she’d disappointed her parents.
Even people like Misakian — who has an April 1 appointment to look towards, secured through the hospital’s hotline — left the registration process feeling uneasy. Just past midnight on Monday, she hit a roadblock while trying to book an appointment online.
Even though registration technically went live for residents older than 55 at midnight, Stamford Health’s registration page, which is operated through ZocDoc, failed to recognize them as eligible. While Misakian knew she could get around the block by boosting her age, something about it felt wrong.
“It’s not a fair approach. It’s relying completely on honesty… Basically, it rewards people for lying,” she said.
Stamford Health told The Advocate that it fixed the error by noon on March 1.
To Misakian, the mishap pointed out just how chaotic the vaccine roll-out could continue being.
“I can’t believe, with all of my ability to navigate all the technology, I ended up getting my appointment by talking to someone,” she said.