Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

I’m all for requiring booster shots for $ACTIVITY, but we need to collectively get our shit together on informing folks of how to get said booster. Or maybe it’s just Washington. I was looking for a booster, so I went to our handy state Department of Health website for the vaccine locator. Nearly every single listing said something to the effect of “last updated: three months ago”. IOW, the site is now abandoned and unmaintained because, hey, we rolled out those vaccines and PROBLEM SOLVED! “Oh, shit, ‘boosters’? But the off-shore development contract only went through July!”

Okay, I’ll try CVS/Walgreens/et. al. If you don’t mind waiting until February, I guess that’s an option. Finally I just gave up and scheduled an appointment within the next two weeks at a clinic 90 minutes away. Then we happened to walk into healthcare provider Kaiser that is ten minutes from home: big fucking arrows and signs, “Walk-ins welcome!!!!11” And so we went back the next day and got our booster shots. But here’s my question/complaint: Kaiser is also the clinic that’s 90 minutes away, where we scheduled our original appointment. On the Kaiser site, there is not a single mention of a walk-in option.

My conclusion is that we appear to have to rely on Facebook posts, and rumors from friends to find a booster because the “official” channels are either not useful or just plain abandoned.

I had the same experience as you here in the bay area. Trying to use the official sites, either from the state government or my healthcare provider, was a chaotic array of dead links, months-old information, and ultimately, a scheduling system that had my waiting several weeks to drive a couple of hours away.

Which is what I was resigned to, until I drove by a huge outdoor, drive-through setup that took walk-ins, located in the parking lot near the animal shelter in San Martin. Very professionally run, and I was in and out in 20 minutes. And yet had I not chosen to drive Monterey instead of 101 that day, I would never have heard or seen it, and it is not on a street most people would use.

Testing too! Last time I had to get a PCR test for travel, there weren’t even test time slots available until like 1 week out. Plane leaves in 4 days? Too bad. I ended up just driving to one of them without an appointment. They were completely empty (despite the booking site saying they had no appointments available) and the bored guy said sure, drive through and do your test. Total scheduling incompetence!

That’s a bit different from my experience. Every time I became eligible, I immediately went to Walgreens website and made an appointment for that week. No hassle at all. Where do you live that it’s that difficult?

SF hasn’t had timely Walgreens booster appts since booster became generally available. I ended up waiting in drop in line at SFGH.

Where do you live that it’s that difficult?

The backwater of Redmond. CVS, Walgreens (EDIT: Walgreens now shows appointments 2 weeks out), not a one of them showed an appointment less than a month out, if they bothered to show an appointment at all. Which reminds me of another annoyance: why not show ‘next available’ instead of making me click through each day to see if there’s an appointment?

I think the key is how fast you do it.

My wife instantly signed up when it was available and got a booster within a couple days. I waited a few days and my appointment was a month out.

We also waited a couple of days for our 6 year old and the appointment was 2 weeks out.

Complete opposite of my experience. You can an appointment at most cvs or Walgreens near me same day in most cases.

Must just be your location. Here in suburban DC, shots are readily available at most CVS locations, Kaiser offices, and other places you’d go for flu shots.

I'm in a dense area of Washington and I walked into a Safeway and got my booster in 10 minutes

I find that the CVS website for scheduling an appointment is trash. It feels like it was designed by a college student with no common sense.

Honestly, I've been able to get both my vaccines (flu and Covid booster) by chance. I came across a vaccine drive run by my town's senior center and went to that for Covid, and then yesterday I happened to walk by the pharmacy in a Target and they were taking walk-ins for flu shots.

Thankfully I live in a state where the leaders really want people to get vaccinated. Yesterday I was driving around an area where there are a lot of illegal immigrants and there were signs all over the place saying "no ID necessary" for a COVID vaccine.

Is there really nobody attempting to be the single source of truth on where you can get vaccinated?

I had the exact same experience as you, but figured I just didn't know where to look. The earliest appointments on my local government website were for weeks out. And, each pharmacy had its own booking website. Surely, there must be someone working on integrating all these fragmented schedules into a single source of truth, and they're just doing a poor job advertising their solution?

Another poor UX is: every pharmacy’s scheduling site asks you 500 questions across multiple web pages before finally telling you they have no appointments for two weeks. Start with the goddamn schedule and then after you find a time slot and location that works, THEN ask the questions!

https://www.vaccines.gov/search/ works perfectly fine, at least in Texas. It shows all the Walmart, CVS, etc. by which vaccine is available

That site is incomplete. When I search for my zipcode, it doesn't return a CVS that I know for a fact is offering boosters every day.

Vaccines.gov seems to be kept up to date for people in the US.

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