In a previous blog entry, I picked on Dallas County’s vaccine waitlist for allowing for selection of a birth date that hasn’t passed yet and then asking age. Today I want to pick on Collin County. The amount of technical debt the county has inadvertently created is simply astounding. Let’s talk about how the county has screwed things up! We’ll try not to be too mean.
Unlike Oklahoma, Texas decided not to create a centralized waitlist. Texas counties and cities within those counties can create their own waitlists. And counties can apparently allocate sections of the list to individual cities.
Nearly all of these cities and counties are requesting that folks add themselves to waitlists in other nearby counties and cities, too. We don’t want to look to far ahead, but we wonder how they’ll be able to calculate how many doses the public actually needs.
No e-mail, big problem!
I added myself to the Collin County waitlist without an e-mail address. There were multiple e-mail fields, but none of them were required. I figured they could text me a link. Shame on me, I was wrong! A human woman was tasked with calling my phone number to get an e-mail address. Imagine how many other users this person is having to call to compensate for a poorly-designed form. #jobcreator
I told the woman I felt bad for her having to call people like this and wished her well.
Good luck removing yourself!
Considering how many folks have probably added themselves to multiple waitlists, it’s logical to assume many users will be vaccinated from another waitlist. In this case, it’s extremely important for Collin County to remove these users to get a more accurate picture of how many users still need to be vaccinated. The woman who called me told me I’d have to e-mail: hcvaccines@co.collin.texas.us
I was assured this was the only way to remove myself from the list.
Which number was I?
Once they sign up for the Collin County waitlist, the user arrives at a page showing their position in the waitlist and a prompted to print it out for their records. But this page does not show any personal information, not even a name or e-mail address. If you forget your number, there is no way to retrieve it. The only thing you can do is enter some personal information to confirm that you are still on the list.
According to the county web site, there are 275,056 users on the list (February 11, 2021).
We’ve included a screenshot of today’s data for Collin County. It’s perhaps worth noting that one of the county’s cities, Plano, ranked as the 3rd safest city in the US, according to WalletHub. Plano was also the second most stressed about COVID, according to an analysis of Twitter posts by Babylon Health.
Does reputation and Twitter-based concern level translate to better digital vaccine infrastructure? It’s difficult to tell. Either way, we wish luck to everyone tasked with fixing or trying to work around these structural issues.
The issues Collin County has introduced into its vaccine waitlist are not only hostile to the user, but to those tasked with coordinating and delivering the vaccine to the public. We wish them all luck.
I agree that Collin County has done a poor job of organizing the public to get vaccinated. I have my name on multiple lists. I received my 1st vaccine, they sent an email, text & phone call. I received a card with the date of my 2nd vaccine when I finished with the 1st one. They don’t give you a time you have to wait for another email, text & phone call. I still haven’t received any form of communication on what time to show up. My appointment is in 4 days!