Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
DeSantis says state will speed up vaccinations
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced a series of steps Monday to speed COVID vaccinations, after a week in which seniors ran into bureaucratic and technical walls as they tried to get the life-saving injections.
The state will convert selected COVID test sites to vaccination sites, use houses of worship in underserved communities as vaccination sites, activate contracts for an additional 1,000 nurses, and send extra personnel into long-term care facilities.
The governor also increased the pressure on hospitals, saying those that don’t administer vaccines quickly won’t get future doses. The vaccines are administered by hospitals and by the Florida Department of Health.
The warning echoed one last week from state Emergency Management Director Jared Moscowitz, who said hospitals would face consequences if they held back vaccines for fear of not having enough to administer the required second doses.
“We want to see this vaccine administered as quickly as possible,” DeSantis said at a news conference Monday at Orlando Health South Seminole Hospital in Longwood. “We’re going to get more and more supplies. But just in a couple weeks’ time, you went from only being able to send it to a small amount of hospitals to now having it available
across the state.”
Florida has received 1,137,000 doses to administer, as of Monday, although only a fraction of that has been given out, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. The first dose has been given to 260,655 people, according to the Florida Department of Health. Each of the two vaccines approved for use in the United States requires two doses.
The governor’s announcement came as glitches continued in the massive vaccination effort for which demand is far exceeding supply.
The state health department’s Broward County website stopped accepting appointments Monday. And its Palm Beach County office shut down COVID phone lines Monday after its system was overwhelmed.
While the Palm Beach County office transitions to a web-based system, the department asked those who are 65 or older to email chd50feedback@flhealth.gov with their name, phone number and date of birth to set up a vaccine appointment.
Marcia Stein, of Boynton Beach, tried three different phone numbers and an email to the state health department’s Palm Beach County office, which yielded only an automatic reply confirming receipt.
“I live in Palm Beach County, and have absolutely no idea where to go or what to do to try to sign up for a vaccination,” she said. “In fact, to illustrate more of
the confusion, my doctor said they will be getting the vaccine, but have no idea when they will get it or how much they will get.”
The Broward website for signing up for COVID vaccines stopped taking appointments Monday morning, after slots filled up. The web site, run by the Broward office of the Florida Department of Health, posted a notice that didn’t say when appointments would resume.
“The Florida Department of Health in Broward County has provided 26,465 COVID-19 vaccination appointments to individuals ages 65 and over,” the notice states. “All appointments have been filled at this time. Please check back to this website often as more sites and appointments will be added over the coming days and weeks. Thank you.”
The website has been
plagued by crashes since last week, as part of a troubled rollout of the state’s vaccination program that involved long lines, computer issues and busy signals.
Even when the Broward site was accepting appointments, it was frustrating, said Hanita Schreiber, 78. It required her to select a location and time and then fill out a form before finding out if that time was unavailable, in which case she had to fill out the form again.
The state had “months to develop a system that should have been ready on day one,” she said. “Lowering the age to 65 in our state when the systems and personnel were not ready to handle it has been one of the most irresponsible responses to a problem that I have ever witnessed.”
The largest number of vaccines have been administered in the state’s most
populous counties. MiamiDade leads the list, with 29,477, followed by Broward with 23,366. In Palm Beach County, the total stands at 12,983.
DeSantis promised the effort would ramp up.
State vaccination sites will offer vaccines seven days a week, DeSantis said.
“We can’t afford to take weekends off at this point,” he said at a second news conference Monday at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami.
Carlos A. Migoya, CEO of Jackson Health System, the hospital network that serves Miami-Dade County, said his hospitals are administering the vaccine to as many people as possible.
“We are giving vaccine as fast as we get it,” he said, appearing with DeSantis at the Miami news conference. “We are not holding back any vaccine because the supply is coming.”
Jackson plans to open a website, accessible from jacksonhealth.org, Tuesday morning to allow sevenday-a-week appointments, with the goal of vaccinating 14,000 people a week and increasing that to up to 75,000. By the early February, he said, that should allow the system to vaccinate about 60% of the people over 65 years of age.
Meanwhile, the glitches continued to frustrate and baffle seniors trying to deal Monday with the state’s overwhelmed computer and phone systems.
David Kornbluh, 85, a retired IT professional from Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, made an appointment last week for himself and his wife. They showed up Monday at their 10 a.m. appointment time at Tradewinds Park in Coconut Creek and were told they couldn’t get their shots.
“We filled out all the paperwork, and when we arrived, they told us we had to have received confirmation electronically,” he said.
They had looked for confirmation earlier and couldn’t find any. And when he wife went on the website again, it had crashed.
“We are now in a position to have to re-register and probably get into March or later for vaccination,” he said. “I don’t want to die because I couldn’t get vaccinated because of an IT glitch. They just put up a web site that was incapable of supporting the kind of volume that they were going to have. It’s incompetent state management.”
Broward Mayor Steve Geller blamed insufficient doses and poor planning, especially after the governor announced that anyone aged 65 or over could get the shots. The counties don’t run local health departments, which are offices of the state health department.
“The governor made the announcement without giving the health department time to figure out how they’re going to do this,” Geller said. “There’s not enough vaccine to go around, they didn’t have enough time to put up websites. The governor should have set reasonable expectations that not everybody is going to be able to get it now.”