Soaring demand among seniors for COVID-19 vaccines causes chaos
Hours after debuting their respective COVID-19 vaccination appointment offerings on Thursday, two of California’s largest health care providers were inundated with a crush of anxious vaccine seekers, pushing their systems to the breaking point and raising questions about rollout readiness in the state.
Sutter Health’s website crashed, and Kaiser Permanente’s phone line warned callers they may face up to four-hour wait times, leaving many of state’s seniors confused and frustrated.
The strong demand for the limited life-saving supplies comes as California and its largest health care providers attempt to speed up the administration of its vaccines to those with the highest risks of dying.
Ranking 43rd in the nation for its slow pace in getting people inoculated, California state officials on Wednesday announced that people 65 and older would be eligible to receive the vaccine sooner than previously planned, though it is up to individual county and health care providers to decide how quickly they open up appointments to certain age groups and phases of the broader public.
Sutter Health, which also owns the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, on Thursday morning launched vaccine appointments for Californians at least 75 years old and health care workers. Those eligible to receive their first dose were permitted to make appointments via Sutter’s call center or through the health care provider’s My Health Online portal.
But throughout most of the afternoon, many online users couldn’t reach Sutter Health’s website.
Those who could get to the homepage — if only briefly — were greeted with a message that read: “System Notice: Due to high demand for vaccination scheduling, My Health Online
and our call center may be temporarily offline or experiencing slowness.”
“Please do not call your care site or provider’s office for scheduling. Thank you for your patience as we work to resolve these issues,” it continued.
Later in the afternoon, Sutter’s vaccination appointment phone line had reached its “call capacity,” and a recording directed patients back to its website for scheduling, which appeared to be up and running again.
Theresa Carey, 65, of Palo Alto, spent all day toggling back and forth from the Sutter website to the cell phone app trying to get her and her husband a coveted appointment. And when she finally managed to log on and go through the appointment questionnaire late Thursday afternoon, she realized Sutter had only opened up appointments to members of the broader public who are 75 and older — not 65.
“We were excited,” Carey said. “… It just sounds like they’re trying to scramble to get it all together.”
In a statement, Sutter said it will broaden eligibility and notify its patients as vaccine supply and appointment capacity grows. Until then, the health care provider is asking patients to have patience.
“We share in the excitement and hope that comes with the COVID-19 vaccine and are working extremely hard to meet eligible patients’ scheduling requests,” the statement said.
Patricia S., 75, of Dublin, said it took her about an hour of persistence to successfully get far enough on the Sutter website to book an appointment after it kicked her off the page multiple times and fed her error messages.
“I thought, ‘I can ride this horse to the barn, I can keep doing this,’ ” she said.
While she said it “was not a hardship” for someone her age with some free time to spend an hour making an appointment, she added that Sutter, being such a large health care provider, “should do better.”
Kaiser Permanente, which opened up a limited supply of appointments to Californians 65 and older, health care workers and long-term care patients and staff, faced similar issues with wait times of four hours on its appointment phone line.
Nancy Thomas, 77, of Newark, waited on hold for more than an hour before securing an appointment with Kaiser to receive her first dose of the life-saving vaccine.
The Kaiser representative she spoke with at first offered her an appointment at a San Leandro facility, but the agent told her the booking disappeared as she was viewing it, likely snagged by another person. After looking for the next available nearby appointment, Thomas was granted a spot for late next week at Kaiser Santa Clara.
“I would’ve waited five hours because it’s that important to me to get that vaccine,” Thomas said in an interview. “I think as the word gets out, they’re going to be even more overwhelmed.”
Kaiser is currently only allowing patients to sign up for appointments via phone but plans to have an online self-service portal in place by next week to give eligible people the opportunity to schedule an appointment online if vaccines are available, according to a statement from the company.
“Understandably, the current limited supplies of vaccine may cause frustration among those eligible to be vaccinated, but we are hopeful that supplies will increase and allow us to more quickly vaccinate more people,” the statement read.
In addition to the Bay Area’s major health care providers, people also were encountering problems with county health departments.
When Mel and Phil Epps, of Lafayette, got an email from the Contra Costa County Health Department on Thursday morning informing them they could make an appointment to get their vaccine, they were elated and jumped on their computers right away.
Each on their own devices, they went through their questionnaires and received a notification that they both had scored a slot. But all wasn’t good.
Mel, 77, had been booked for an appointment in San Pablo while Phil, 80, had one in Martinez. Nervous about the long drive to an unfamiliar area, Mel spent about an hour calling different phone numbers listed for the health department without any luck getting to a live voice.
“They’vehadayearplus to get things set up, and they’re already having problems with the system,” he said.
“Let’s just say it didn’t do any good for my blood pressure.”