PORTLAND, Oregon — Monday morning, for the first time in weeks, there was not a mad scramble online to get appointments for COVID vaccinations at the Oregon Convention Center.
After a disastrous performance last week by the website, organizers kept people out of the site and instead began calling seniors selected by the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) at random.
OHA is working off of lists of people who signed up at the Get Vaccinated Oregon site, where all Oregonians can register.
A spokesperson for the convention center effort said calls will be placed to people between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. from Monday through Thursday.
“Our first contact is a text saying you are eligible and we will be call you in the next 24 hours to schedule your appointment," the spokesperson said. "We make two attempts via phone to reach a person.”
RELATED: 'They'll contact you': Oregon changes vaccination scheduling process for Portland metro area
The change still confused many people including Catherine Rutledge, who searched Monday for an appointment for her husband.
“I searched the website, and I couldn’t find anything," she said. "And I’m pretty good with technology. I couldn’t figure out any way to get a notification, it just wasn’t clear to me.”
Gov. Kate Brown made all Oregonians 65-69 years old eligible for the vaccine starting March 1. They join more than 200,000 seniors in the greater Portland area aged 70 and older who are eligible and still trying to secure their first COVID vaccine shots.
The OHSU COVID 19 website posted 2,400 appointments for their Portland International Airport drive-thru clinic Monday morning at 9 a.m. They were available for anyone who was eligible. All appointments were snapped up in 10 minutes.
While some were successful many were not. Leslie Waygren described her struggles with the site Monday.
“I was trying to get an appointment for the airport drive-thru site," she said. "After losing a few slots while I was identifying things in the 'I am not a robot' photo quiz, I then got a list of five or six time slots. But the the heartbeat that indicated that it was still working kept beating, and when I tried to click on any of the time slots, nothing happened. I refreshed; same thing. I went through the whole process again, starting with the vaccine information tool at the bottom of the OHA website. It made no difference.
“I was an early adopter of computers; I'm definitely not computer illiterate, but these websites are super confusing.”
There is still plenty of work to do as Oregon’s confusing rollout of the vaccine continues in the greater Portland area.
Some pharmacies are starting to offer appointments, but there are challenges there too. Walgreens admitted they had some issues after viewers complained to us about glitches that kept them from reserving open appointments.
One of the groups trying to help seniors is the Hollywood Senior Center.
Amber Kern-Johnson is the executive director.
“I just have a lot of concerns about this new process in addition to the existing,” she said. "I mean there's just so much confusion."
Her group gathered volunteers to help seniors sign up online. Now she worries that waiting for a phone call will not be much better.
“There are going to be a lot of people who aren’t answering the phone right away, you know, as a lot of people have been trained, because it could be a scammer," she said. "Everyone is checking their messages.”
Amid the shortage of vaccine and confusion on how and where to sign up for shots, there is good news: 34,000 doses of the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine will arrive in Oregon sometime this week, according to the state.
“I think this is great news,” said Dr. Justin Jin, an infectious disease doctor at Providence Portland. "The more vaccines we can have in the fight at this point in the game is welcome news."
He said we should all take whichever vaccine we can get first, and that having another option will help the country.
“I think this is going to be a welcome step in order for our country to be able to get back to some semblance of normalcy, to have a third vaccine,” Dr. Jin said.
Have a comment or question for Pat Dooris? Email him at pdooris@kgw.com