On Wednesday, under increasing criticism for the state\u2019s slow vaccine rollout, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) announced that all Californians 65 and older will be eligible for the shot. <\/p>\n
But if you were a Californian who wanted to find more information about where to get that shot for yourself or your loved one, you would\u2019ve been out of luck. While the state\u2019s website has been updated to say that individuals 65 or older are eligible, there are no tools to find a nearby location where vaccines are available. The state\u2019s official FAQ answers the question, \u201cHow can I get the Covid-19 vaccine?\u201d with, \u201cMost Californians will be vaccinated at community vaccination sites, doctor\u2019s offices, clinics, or pharmacies\u201d \u2014 no links, no instructions about how to find one near you. <\/p>\n
So, fed-up Californians are taking matters into their own hands: they\u2019re crowdsourcing it. In the last two days, an effort has sprung up to report on where shots are available to the elderly. Volunteers have set up a spreadsheet with a simple premise: One person can call each location every day and ask if vaccines are available, and then publish the information for everyone to see. (There\u2019s a way to submit updates and corrections, too.) Once the team is confident in their two-day-old system, they\u2019ll open up crowdsourcing and reporting, soliciting more help and more publicity so it can reach more Californians. <\/p>\n
The crowdsourced list of where Covid-19 vaccines are available, and to whom, is a microcosm of both everything good and everything utterly broken about the United States\u2019 coronavirus response. <\/p>\n
Throughout the pandemic, national coordination has been lacking, causing public health tasks to fall to states and counties that vary dramatically in their preparedness to take them on. Coordination tasks that should be the business of government \u2014 from ensuring that there\u2019s enough personal protective equipment (PPE) for hospital workers to reporting data on Covid-19 cases to letting people know which clinics offer vaccines \u2014 have fallen to hospitals themselves, or even to individuals.<\/p>\n
Against that grim backdrop, people have stepped up, over and over, to get things done where our institutions have failed. In Washington State, university researchers studying the flu were among the first to detect the novel coronavirus in the country, while the CDC floundered. In Florida, a lone fired data scientist kept the state\u2019s citizens updated about coronavirus case numbers. Journalists and researchers like Zeynep Tufekci told the public to wear masks and to worry about ventilation long before official organizations like the CDC and WHO recommended that. A group of citizens developed and published a risk points calculator to help people understand the risks of different daily activities. <\/p>\n<\/aside>\n
And now in California, volunteers are trying to figure out which hospitals have enough vaccine supply to vaccinate elderly Americans. Should such a task fall to them? No. But since it has, I\u2019m glad we have them.<\/p>\n
How California got an unofficial vaccine availability dashboard overnight<\/p>\n
Few US states have done an impressive job of rolling out the desperately needed Covid-19 vaccines in the month since the FDA approved them, but the most populous state, California, is among those having a particularly poor showing. The state with the best vaccination program, West Virginia, has used 78.6 percent of the doses shipped to it; California has used 27 percent, putting it 49th in the country. (Only Alabama, at 21 percent, is doing worse.) Seven percent of West Virginians have been vaccinated; only 2.5 percent of Californians have. <\/p>\n
On Wednesday, January 13, Newsom announced that people aged 65 and older could be vaccinated in California, as part of a push to improve the state\u2019s dismal overall vaccination performance. (Newsom\u2019s office has not responded to a request for comment.) Yet California is lacking the infrastructure for vaccine availability reporting that many other states have, though some counties have their own systems. For instance, West Virginia\u2019s vaccination website lists every clinic conducting vaccinations each day, with an address and specific details about how to get a vaccine. Texas has a huge map of vaccination locations across the whole state, with the ones with availability highlighted.<\/p>\n
The unofficial California dashboard came together as a result of a call to arms on Twitter from Patrick McKenzie, a well-known tech worker and writer currently at Stripe, a payments company that before the pandemic was based in San Francisco.<\/p>\n