Just eight minutes after opening Tuesday, Feb. 9, all of Summit County’s vaccine appointments were full, county spokesperson Nicole Valentine wrote in an email.
With such high demand and a whole new group of people eligible to get the vaccine, it can feel like an appointment is harder to secure than Beyoncé tickets.
But unlike other blink-and-you-miss-it items, vaccine appointments aren’t going away. The county will be receiving doses weekly for the foreseeable future.
“We’re not going to get enough to do everybody all at once,” Public Health Director Amy Wineland said at a Summit County Board of Health meeting Tuesday. “What we do know is that we’ll continue to get some on a weekly basis.”
Even knowing that supply is limited, some people still are frustrated with the process for making appointments. The county uses SC Alert, a system that it previously used to let people know about emergency situations, road closures or controlled burns.
Now, the county is using the alert system to notify the public when vaccine appointments are available. However, there’s one problem: The system is delayed when sending out text messages, emails and phone calls.
It can take as long as 40 minutes for a person to receive a phone call about open appointments, meaning the alert could come long past when appointments are filled. On Tuesday, many people received their alert after all the appointments had been filled, Valentine said.
The county has about 30,000 subscribers to the alert system, accounting for some of the delay, Valentine said at the meeting.
“Text messages go through the fastest,” she said. “It seems to take longer to get those phone calls out to all individuals that are subscribed.”
Even if there wasn’t a delay to the alert system, there’s no getting around the fact that appointments will fill up fast. The 2018 census estimated there are 1,548 residents ages 65-69 in Summit County, which doesn’t include the educators and child care workers in the county. In total, Wineland said she estimates the new phase includes about 3,000 residents.
