New county webpage created ahead of 10,000 vaccination appointments to roll out Saturday
On Friday at noon Supervisor V. Manuel Perez held a briefing with Coachella Valley leaders to discuss the current state of emergency operations. Officials announced that Riverside County would roll out an additional 10,000 vaccination appointments on its website by noon on Saturday. The appointments will be for next week.
You can watch the complete briefing below:
The county's website experienced a crash on Thursday afternoon just as 3,900 additional appointments were made available.
"I kept getting 'error' messages telling me that- it didn’t say the system crashed, it just had some 'off' message," said Palm Desert resident, Patricia Finn.
Finn is one of many residents who experienced the technical difficulties Thursday while trying to snag an appointment.
"It’s not an intuitive process," said Finn.
"Yesterday was obviously a difficult day for us technology-wise. We were using a third party vendor to run our vaccine website and the process of the vendor made some changes to address it and improve some earlier issues," said Riverside County's Interim Executive Officer, Juan C. Perez.
Perez said the issues happened while those improvements were being made to the site.
"We experienced problems with the website where it crashed several times," said Perez.
On Friday officials said information technology employees worked through the night to post a new webpage, which will make the appointment-scheduling process slightly different.
"That page will be updated with live links that will then take our residents to that statewide system to book appointments. If someone uses the former link it will redirect to this new page," said Riverside County Department of Public Health spokesperson, Brooke Federico.
Officials addressed the fact that the webpage will not be as streamlined as it could be, but that it would keep access uninterrupted and help the county administer vaccines as quickly as possible.
"That state registration portal, to put it simply, is not designed like Ticketmaster so it doesn’t look for available time slots first and then goes to personal information. What happens is when users go to that statewide system, they put in their personal information and then at the end they see if there’s any available time slots," said Federico.
"I hope it works. I don’t have a lot of faith at the moment," said Finn.
Finn has been trying to make an appointment for more than a week. She is hoping Saturday is her day.
"I’m going to be sitting at the computer ready to go."
MORE: Riverside County apologizes for ‘unacceptable’ vaccine appointment website meltdown
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