At the end of March, about 30% of seniors aged 80 and up in Ontario had not received their shot. This was regarded as very low and a failure of the vaccine rollout. Many reasons were suggested for this.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/covid-19-vaccine-ontario-booking-appointments-1.5958792
However, the article does not mention what has been one of the main problems. Many people just did not know how or where to get a vaccination. Often when a vaccination site opened up, it was word of mouth that notified people that they could register for a shot. I registered for my shot when I got an email from a friend at 11 pm one night. Of course, this leaves out many people who aren’t as well connected.
Many older people who got a vaccination were able to do so because they had a relative or a friend who negotiated the myriad paths to find out how to book a shot. Even computer literate younger relatives often spent hours scouring websites to locate a vaccination site that their relative/friend could use. I have heard these stories from many people. This has been a problem from New York to California as well as Ontario.
Why has the vaccine rollout been so chaotic?
There is really no excuse for yet another case of really bad pandemic policy and management by government and public health.
Here’s a simple common sense approach that should have been followed (this example is for Ontario but is applicable to other jurisdictions).
Every person eligible for a vaccination in Ontario has an OHIP number (Ontario Health Insurance Program). The government has a database of all of these people. Each OHIP record has the name of the person, date of birth, address and phone number. So the Ministry of Health could have easily contacted every person in Ontario to give them clear instructions in advance on how to get a vaccination.
Here is a simple letter that should have been sent out in November to everyone in Ontario with an OHIP number.
That was pretty easy, it took about 20 minutes to draft this letter.
You’d think that with a budget exceeding $1 billion for a provincewide vaccination plan, someone in the Ontario government could have organized this. Of course this plan would have to be followed up with a robust web server and phone answering service built to handle a large number of requests. In 2020, this was not rocket science.
Ontario did finally provide a central website for booking vaccines, but instead of in November it was not up and running until March 15.
