California's Clearest COVID-19 Vaccine Appointment Dashboard Is Run by Volunteers

• RELATED: Where Can I Get a COVID-19 Vaccine in the Bay Area? 

This post was updated Feb. 5.

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If you've been looking for facts about getting your COVID-19 vaccine, you might have discovered that just finding clear information on how to schedule an appointment for an eligible person can be a difficult, time-consuming process.

In mid-January a site called VaccinateCA launched that not only lists vaccination sites around California, but details their current vaccine availability. The information is gathered manually by a team who compiled a list of medical centers, pharmacies and hospitals around the state, and now regularly contacts those locations to confirm their vaccine inventory — as well as what groups they're now accepting, and how to make an appointment yourself. There are also now versions of the site in Spanish and Simplified Chinese.  

• Tell us: What do you want to know about getting the COVID-19 vaccine in the Bay Area?

But the thing about VaccinateCA? It's completely staffed by volunteers who make those calls, maintain the website and coordinate efforts across the state. And this crowdsourcing is filling a need in California that as yet, health officials don't seem to have addressed themselves: the need for residents to simply schedule a COVID-19 vaccine appointment near them.

Confusion and Low Availability

California has begun by prioritizing health care workers and long-term care residents (Phase 1A) for vaccination, and is now moving into its next phases. But even if you're eligible for the state's current vaccination phase, you'll need to find a vaccination site near you that has inventory enough to be able to serve you.

With Gov. Gavin Newsom's Jan. 13 announcement that people 65 and older were now eligible to receive the vaccine – and were being prioritized despite their (still) official place in line in Phase 1B — a huge number of Californians and their families breathed a sigh of relief. Yet many of those seniors are finding that despite now being vaccine-eligible on paper, the limited supply of doses in many counties means that officials are still vaccinating those health care workers from Phase 1A.

Even if your county does have availability, just making the appointment for an eligible person to get their vaccine can be far more difficult than you might think. As this Twitter thread from surgeon and advocate Dr. Arghavan Salles details, even trying to find the information itself can be a frustrating, circular process, littered with informational dead ends online.

And when finding this crucial information is so complex, it heightens the difficulty for those with less time and resources, those without consistent access to the internet, and for residents who speak languages other than English or who don't have experience navigating the U.S. medical system.

The state has launched MyTurn, a tool which allows Californians to input their details to see instantly if they're currently eligible for the vaccine — and to sign up for notifications about eligibility and future appointment scheduling.

The My Turn site now says that if you're near San Francisco, Los Angeles or San Diego, "you may be able to schedule your appointment today" using the tool, and that they're "adding appointments to My Turn daily, and expanding statewide." Check if you're currently able to make an appointment through My Turn here.

How VaccinateCA Works

Newsom's Jan. 13 announcement that Californians age 65 and older were now eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine prompted tech worker Patrick McKenzie to issue a simple call on Twitter:

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we've seen how misinformation — intentional or inadvertent — can rush to fill a void created by an absence of reliable information from official sources. Goregaokar said he and the VaccinateCA team are accordingly aware of the importance of keeping the dashboard's information up to date and accurate, and urged users to submit any additions or corrections through the site, such as adding a missing vaccination location, correcting contact information or reporting unavailable vaccines.

To prevent their information from resulting in vaccine seekers jamming up a clinic's phone lines, Goregaokar said the VaccinateCA dashboard only lists phone numbers when that's the location's stated preference for scheduling vaccination appointments. Generally, when it comes to errors, Goregaokar said, "It's more often just that we're listing a place as a 'yes,' but the 'yes' conditions are more nuanced than we thought."

VaccinateCA's quest has also had the unintended consequence of alerting several pharmacies to the fact that they're not in their county's system as eligible vaccine providers — even though they should be.

Goregaokar said after one Rite Aid pharmacy in San Bernardino County was called by a VaccinateCA volunteer, pharmacy staff realized they weren't actually listed as a provider by the county — and were accordingly not receiving appointment requests for the vaccines they had. Pharmacy staff then worked with the county to correct the situation, prompting VaccinateCA's volunteers to then make more calls to other Rite Aid pharmacies in that region to advise them to do the same.

As Goregaokar wrote on Twitter, "This switch between 'we're directly helping people, indirectly helping the system' to 'we're also directly helping the system' was fascinating to watch unfold, and really rewarding."