To get the shot, you clearly need a planDate: 3/1/2021 Okay, I’m now armed with a strategy about how I can sign up for the COVID-19 vaccination.
That’s right a strategy. You don’t need instructions. You need to have a plan.
One would think it would be as simple as selecting a date, time and place and getting the inoculation.
You would be wrong. The plan is right up there with attempting to score tickets to a hot concert. If you’ve been successful in obtaining Springsteen concert tix, you may have the skills to get an appointment for the vaccine.
I spent some time this week trying out the new and improved state system. A friend of mine told me how he attempted 12 times to finalize the appointment process only to have each effort end in disappointment.
He has more patience than me.
I attempted to see just where I could get an inoculation. I sought out availabilities at the Eastfield Mall site, the Big Y, CVS and Baystate’s vaccination center in Holyoke.
Either the response was no appointments are available or the site does not have the vaccine at the time I tried. If I remember correctly there might have been some appointments in Greenfield. They had four sites with only one open to residents outside of Franklin County.
I guess I lack the perseverance of the guy who was standing in line next to Springfield City Councilor Tim Allen at the Eastfield site. That person had driven from Brewster on the Cape. That was probably close to a three-hour trip.
So, another friend advised me to start the process on a Monday when more appointments are released and to refresh the site frequently in order to get my place in line. I’m going to try that approach.
I’m not going to beat Gov. Baker over the head about this again – well maybe a little. I think he is quite upset about it. He said on Feb. 19 on WGBH radio in Boston, “My hair’s on fire about the whole thing. I can’t even begin to tell you how pissed off I am.”
It’s not every day a governor uses such language but this is not just any day – we’re still in a pandemic.
The state’s appointment site crashed on Feb. 19, treating Bay Staters with the sight of a four-armed octopus and an error message. I’m still trying to figure out what the heck the octopus meant.
The State House News reported, “Baker said the state was working to make user-friendly improvements to the vaccination appointment website, but repeatedly pointed to Centers for Disease Control statistics that he said put Massachusetts among the top 10 states in the country for doses administered per capita.
“The governor said Massachusetts also ranks number one for first doses administered per capita among peer states with at least 5 million people, and said Bloomberg’s tracker puts the state second in the country for its rate of vaccination among Black residents.”
Well, when you have lemons, make lemonade.
I do know that Springfield’s Commissioner of Health and Human Services Helen Caulton-Harris is very concerned about how many people of color in the city are getting the vaccine. Caulton-Harris has the infrastructure in place for the city to administer the vaccine. She has sites ready at every school, meaning the vaccine is being brought into every neighborhood.
The only problem is she does not have any vaccine.
I think one thing is definitely true: we still have months to go before anything that looks like “normal” reappears.
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