MyTurn COVID Vaccine Appointment Website Gets Low Marks From Critics
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) – The state website that California created to help residents schedule COVID-19 vaccine appointments has so far not met expectations, a new report alleges.
Only 27% of vaccination appointments booked by Californians have been made on the state's MyTurn website, according to a report last week from the nonprofit journalism group CalMatters.
It amounts to about 100,000 appointments per day.
One of the issues, according to CalMatters, is that while the site can schedule appointments at mass vaccinations sites run by cities and counties, it cannot do so at pharmacies, grocery stores or health insurance providers such as Kaiser Permanente, which receive their own vaccine doses directly from the federal government.
Another problem is that the site will often tell people that no appointments are available in their zip code, when in fact there are, but they have to scroll down on the page to find links to sites that do have such available appointments.
When it launched back in January, Gov. Gavin Newsom said it would allow vaccine providers to input faster,
more up-to-date information on the numbers of shots being administered.
"It's not just a notification system as some other states have, or a system for reservations just with state clinics, this is an end-to-end system across the spectrum -- bottom up, top down, providers -- a whole spectrum delivery system and a database that allows more immediate data to be transferred to the CDC," Newsom said at the time.
The MyTurn system was built from scratch and is largely overseen by Blue Shield, according to CalMatters.
On Sunday, the California Department of Technology published a blog post defending the MyTurn website. In it, it said that California ranks No. 7 in the nation in daily vaccine volume.
"Some recent media reports ignore the huge contribution MyTurn has made to California's vaccine effort," the post read. "To understand the scale of the MyTurn system that has existed for three short months, it's useful to compare it with the US state ranking on Bloomberg's vaccine tracker. On average week of April 19, about 100,000 vaccines were delivered per day that were found through the MyTurn system. That volume puts the system in seventh place among states—just below Illinois and just above Ohio. There are 43 states in the union delivering less vaccine per day than MyTurn."
According to the latest state numbers Monday, 11.77 million Californians are fully vaccinated. An average of 339,000 doses are administered daily statewide.
