The first cash and prize drawings in Washington's "Shot of a Lifetime" vaccine lottery occurred on Tuesday, and state health officials are assuring vaccinated residents that over 3 million people are eligible to win despite many having trouble accessing their immunization records. The state's vaccine effort has been experiencing softening demand over the past few weeks, with 64% of the population 16 and older or 3.9 million residents .
Pierce County works to improve COVID vaccine access as wider eligibility looms
News Tribune, Tacoma, Wash. 3/13/2021 Debbie Cockrell and Josephine Peterson, The News Tribune (Tacoma, Wash.)
Mar. 13 Amid recent federal and state announcements of accelerated timelines for COVID-19 vaccinations and reopening the economy and schools, Pierce County is continuing to adapt its own systems to keep up.
Adding call center access for those without computers, improving the technical side of registering and sending information to the state, and improving the flow through the mass vaccination clinics have all been ongoing works of progress.
According to Kayla Scrivner, immunization branch director for the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department: We re adding more and more staff to that call center and have been capturing and tracking that . And through social media, if people reach out to us, we make sure they know about future events, or if they ve had trouble registering
How a delayed software launch hindered Washington’s vaccine rollout [The Seattle Times]
Jan. 21 After a full day vaccinating seniors and health care workers, Mark Tan has gone home and spent hours manually entering their data into the state’s immunization registry.
That laborious process, played out across the state, has bogged down vaccinations and left state officials blind to where unused doses remained. Tan, the owner of a small pharmacy on Bainbridge Island, still had a stack of about 150 patient forms he hadn’t yet entered last week, despite 15-hour days.
His pharmacy is one of more than 800 coronavirus vaccine providers statewide grappling with a state immunization system ill-fitted for the pandemic. The process was supposed to be streamlined by specialized mass vaccine software, but the state Department of Health didn’t launch it until Jan. 15, more than a month after the first COVID-19 doses arrived in Washington.