COVID Vaccine In Short Supply, Sign-Up Website Crashes As SF Struggles To 'Meet The Moment'
SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX) -- To borrow a favorite phrase from Governor Gavin Newsom, San Francisco is struggling to "meet the moment" when it comes to its rollout of the COVID vaccine.
Tuesday, Mayor London Breed warned the city could run out of doses by Thursday. To make matters worse, the city and county of San Francisco launched it's vaccine sign-up page Tuesday, which promptly crashed and sent some folks who signed up for their doses over 50 confirmatory text messages.
"This should be something that our bureaucracy knows how to do and can get done quickly and I think that it's concerning for the next couple of weeks and months when we what we are going to need to get done is only going to get more challenging and more complicated and bigger," said District 6 Supervisor Matt Haney.
In San Mateo County, where healthcare workers have been receiving shots at mass vaccine clinics, the health director, Dr. Scott Morrow published a pages-long statement criticizing the rollout and lack of transparency.
"To vaccinate most of the population adequately by July, all the entities in the county would need to vaccinate 40,000 people per week, or about 6,000 per day. The current supply coming to the various entities in the county appears to be about one tenth this rate," Dr. Morrow said in a statement.
UCSF infectious disease specialist Dr. Peter Chin-Hong says the allocation process thus far has been about as clear as mud.
"We still don't know the details, it's kind of like in the dark of night you get the email message and different systems have different organizational capabilities," Chin-Hong said.
San Francisco's website eventually got back online, but Sup. Haney says more is needed from the brains of Silicon Valley.
"I would like to see a volunteer sign-up website, which I haven't seen. I would like to see an appointment sign-up website and process that I haven't seen. I want these text messages to be interactive so people can ask questions back and forth."