SC seniors told they could sign up for COVID vaccine were met with headaches instead
Technical glitches, a crashed state website and elusive appointments are dogging the state’s rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine to residents age 70 and older.
Roughly 20 vaccine providers of the hundreds enrolled across the state were reporting appointment availability Wednesday afternoon for the roughly 630,000 South Carolina residents age 70 and older, according to the state Department of Health and Environmental Control’s vaccine locator map.
While there is some overlap between the groups and not everyone will want the vaccine, seniors are also competing for appointments with the approximately 350,000 health care workers and long-term care facility residents and staff who have been eligible for vaccinations since mid-December.
Brannon Traxler, DHEC’s public health director, said more than 5,000 people called the agency’s hotline Wednesday morning to get information about scheduling a vaccine appointment, about five times more calls than the the line receives on a typical day.
“This is good news and it does show that the level of interest of South Carolinians to do their part by getting vaccinated is high,” she said. “At the same time, this overwhelming call volume initially created technical issues with the phone system, which is in the process of being corrected.”
She said the agency had contracted with a vendor Wednesday morning to expand the call line’s capacity by doubling the number of dedicated call center operators answering the phones.
With South Carolina currently receiving only about 60,000 doses of vaccine from the federal government each week, state health officials have tried to temper expectations since announcing Monday that all residents 70 and older could begin scheduling vaccination appointments Wednesday.
DHEC acting director Marshall Taylor testified during an S.C. Senate Medical Affairs committee meeting Tuesday that, at the current pace, it would take about 10 weeks before the state even has the supply necessary to vaccinate everyone over 70.
“It’s going to take time to get through every one of these groups,” Taylor said. “This is not going to be a fast process until vaccine really starts flowing into the state.”
As of Tuesday, South Carolina had received 233,600 total vaccine doses, about one third of which are reserved for long-term care facility residents and staff. The state, which has administered nearly 115,000 of those doses to date, currently ranks 49th among states in its vaccine administration per capita, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
State health officials, under pressure from lawmakers and hospital executives to expedite the vaccine rollout, have modified South Carolina’s vaccination plan repeatedly in recent weeks to address criticism that it excessively restricted the populations initially eligible for a dose.
Over the past two weeks, the agency has broadened and clarified the categories of health care workers included in the state’s initial vaccination phase (Phase 1a), set a Jan. 15 deadline for eligible health care workers to schedule a vaccination appointment and told hospitals to begin offering the vaccine to inpatients 65 and older who don’t currently have COVID-19 to expedite the inoculation of South Carolina’s most vulnerable residents.
The agency’s latest attempt to expand the pool of people eligible for the vaccine came Monday when it announced that South Carolinians age 70 and older could soon begin scheduling vaccination appointments and launched a phone line and online locator tool for finding providers.
Vaccine-eager South Carolinians flooded DHEC’s locator website, which quickly went down and was then taken offline until Wednesday morning. People also reported problems with the phone line, complaining of long hold times and a lack of follow-up after being told to expect a call back with more information.
Many vaccine providers, who learned at the same time as the public that they’d be expected to begin inoculating seniors two days later, were also unprepared to receive the influx of calls from people inquiring about appointments, Taylor said.
State lawmakers grilled DHEC officials about the scheduling issues Tuesday, demanding to know why it seemed like the agency was operating without a sense of urgency during the pandemic.
“Why was DHEC not prepared?” Sen. Marlon Kimpson, D-Charleston, asked Taylor at Tuesday’s committee meeting. “We got a hotline. We’ve got a website. Now, within an hour after the website, the website crashes. We’ve got people all across this state calling my office.
“Can you help me understand why we weren’t adequately prepared to have a working website and to adequately staff the phone?”
Taylor responded that he’d been surprised by the volume of people who rushed to the vaccine locator website when it launched Monday and said the agency hadn’t expected that sort of response until Wednesday.
“We thought that when we said, ‘Look on Wednesday,’ people would start looking on Wednesday,” he said. “And so I can’t answer the question for why the website crashed, but (Wednesday) was when we were prepared or were preparing for that inundation of calls.”
Sen. Brad Hutto, of Orangeburg, then asked Taylor whether DHEC was prepared to handle the “potentially 100,000” calls the agency’s hotline would receive Wednesday morning.
“You talk about the website going down, maybe the phone company will go down,” Hutto said. “I don’t know how this is going to work.”
Taylor said he thought the agency could handle the volume, as long as most people went to its website rather than calling the hotline.
“We’re asking people, if you have access to a computer, if you have access to a cell phone, to go to our website,” he said.
Taylor acknowledged that DHEC’s current system for scheduling vaccination appointments is “archaic” and called it a “short-term fix.”
He said the agency was working with another state to create a “one-stop shop” online scheduling system where, after answering a few questions, users could book vaccination appointments directly.
However, that system is unlikely to be ready for another two or three weeks, so in the meantime residents should continue checking the agency’s online locator tool and contacting vaccine providers directly to schedule an appointment, Taylor said.
DHEC said in a statement Wednesday that in order to manage the high expected call volume, the agency had partnered with the state Emergency Management Division for call support.
The agency encouraged residents to check the online locator tool regularly for the latest information about vaccine availability and preached patience as it works to ensure the state’s limited doses of vaccine are prioritized for those most vulnerable to COVID-19.
This story was originally published January 13, 2021 at 1:47 PM.