Vaccine rollout was aggravating
By Letter to the Editor on March 3, 2021.
Editor:
The Alberta government’s roll-out of Covid-19 vaccinations on Wednesday, Feb. 24th was made unnecessarily frustrating by lack of candour, efficiency and foresight.
The government had fewer than 100,000 doses available to provide for a group of seniors numbering around half a million persons. Its website was overwhelmed within minutes of coming on-line.
The 811 phone number was also swamped and unreachable for much of the day. Patently the IT gurus in the government’s employ had made no preparations for the likely avalanche of hits and calls.
A more prudent approach might have been to inform the public that there was a great shortage of vaccine and that all the doses available would be restricted to Edmonton and Calgary, for example. Pretending that everyone in the Province had an equal chance to get an appointment was misleading and disingenuous.
Surely it made more sense to use what stocks that were on hand in the two major cities.
By the time I managed to get into the on-line queue, around 10 p.m., I was told that there were 15,000 ahead of me in the line and that I had a 20-minute wait.
So there I sat and until at last I was directed to the appropriate place only to learn that stocks had run out in my location!
How much less aggravating would it have been for me to have been given this information earlier
Were Mr Kenney and his henchmen afraid to let us know what the actual situation was?
David Amies
Lethbridge
-1
I nominate you to manage the next pandemic. You and your henchman!!!!
Another ignorant senior who likes to lie. I doubt their were 15,000 a head of him and it only took 20 minutes to get in. I waited 40 minutes in line in Edmonton on Monday and I never heard one complaint , we all thought it was handled very well and it was fun talking with one another while six feet a part .There were 30 nurses giving shots.
None of us were dumb enough to think that there wouldn’t be problem when there were so many needing shots. It’s not like seniors don’t have the time to come again. We get our next shot on April 8th and looking forward to it..
You obviously understand little about IT and it would appear the same applies to Alberta’s hired IT specialists. “This ignorant senior who likes to lie” isn’t a liar. But because his experience differs from yours, he must be, right?
IT people divide pings on a server by having more than one server for the same URL. So you may have had easy access to the servers servicing Edmonton, there could have been MANY. Just as there may have been MANY servicing Calgary/Red Deer. But, there may have been only one server serving anything but Calgary/Edmonton, and that one,, was bombarded to a point of frustration.
The same applies to 811 The region (south) may have had 10 people serving the region. Where the 811 center for Edmonton might have had 250 and the same for Calgary Red Deer. How do they do that? It goes through the same routing as 911. If you call 911 in Lethbridge you do not get the same center as 911 for Red Deer, its a product of geographical routing, …..until Kenney Changed it.
So stick to dead Provincial Politicians, it appears its the only “expertise” you claim to have!
well, it may prove a blessing for those that missed their dose. while referred to as vaccines, keep in mind these were rushed into action far quicker than prior cocktails called vaccines over the decades. moreover, the mrna vaccines are further a novel approach. time will tell, but this is proving to be a novel approach to testing whether a vaccine not only proves effective, but more importantly, whether it proves to be safe. at the helm of all this, govt and big pharm, for me, a combination that, based on their sordid histories, is very difficult to trust.
I obviously didn’t read David’s letter properly and I apologize for it. I was in too big a hurry to go out to meet with some of my friends for lunch. we met in a park, built a fire and visited for two hours. We hadn’t seen each other since last fall. They all had problems like David, I didn’t.
My grandson phoned and said he knew how to get me registered. He had just gotten his other grandparents done without any problem. He needed my health care number. He is a university student and a computer expert and I don’t know what he did , but he had me registered within about two minutes.
I had no idea that the situation was as bad as it was, but my friends certainly straightened me out. Once again I apologize to David I didn’t read your letter properly.
honourable reply!