Friday, 26 February 2021

DC's Covid vaccine Web site melts down again

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DC's Covid vaccine Web site melts down again

After trying and failing for nearly an hour to get a Coronavirus vaccine appointment on the DC government Web site, I need a drink.

John Aravosis

Feb 26

I need a drink.

Today was my first day eligible to sign up for a Covid vaccination in DC, and it was an utter fiasco. The DC government Web site melted down, and the phone number for setting up an appointment offline gave a Verizon error message. So no vaccine for me!

This isn’t a new problem. DC’s Web site has been having problems for at least a month. A friend of mine went online almost exactly four weeks ago to reserve a vaccination for an elderly neighbor. She was thwarted by a never-ending Captcha error. The same Captcha error doomed my effort to secure a vaccine today as well.

DC’s Coronavirus Web site Captcha requirement — I entered the correct information above, but it claimed I didn’t, again and again and again.

Captcha is used to stop bots from grabbing all the concert tickets, or in this case, vaccine slots, and reselling/redistributing them. But how would that work exactly with Covid? When you sign up for a vaccine, you have to give your real name and real address. No bot can provide that. If you show up to get the vaccine, and you’re not the person who registered, you don’t get a vaccine. So why is DC using Captcha at all?

Also, it simply doesn’t work. On the DC site, every time I’d enter the correct Captcha, it would take a minute or two to send the information — the entire site immediately ground to a crawl the moment registration opened at 9am ET — and then it would tell me the Captcha information I entered was wrong. Just a guess, but by the time the site got to sending my Captcha information, Captcha had already timed out and provided me a NEW code to enter. But it was too late to enter the new code, and the site was locked in the process of sending the old code that I had already typed.

What resulted was this example below that I copied live. I entered the correct code — bV7gB5J — but as the page was “processing” my submission of that Captcha information, suddenly a new Captcha popped up, hsXZ2yx. And then I’d get an error that my Captcha was wrong.

Here’s the original Captcha, and my correct entry:

I clicked “next,” waited a long time, and here’s what popped up as I was waiting — an entirely new Captcha!

I finally got a message saying I’d entered the wrong Captcha, when I obviously didn’t. (It’s always good to keep receipts.)

This went on for a good 10 to 15 minutes — me entering the correct Captcha, it telling me I didn’t — until I figured out what had to be the problem — the slow Captcha submission, caused by the slowed Web site, kept permitting Captcha to change the code before my data was submitted — and once it was finally submitted, it was by now the wrong Captcha code. So the next time, I typed the Captcha as quickly as I could, and it finally worked.

Mind you, the entire Web site crawled to a near halt the second registration opened. It took a good minute or two for each page to come up after you clicked the “next” button. It never got better until all the vaccines were taken for. (Oh yeah, the site also gives you about six vaccine locations near you(ish) that are taking reservations, but none of them actually have reservations — and the process of clicking through each location, simply to then find out they have no slots, also was ground a near halt, further slowing you down.)

Since the Web site wasn’t working, I decided to call the toll-free number that DC conveniently set up in case the Web site isn’t work. Yeah, right. Every time I called, I got an automated message from Verizon that the number was in error. And before anyone says, “well, there were a lot of people calling, so of course the number got overwhelmed,” I spent my teen years in the 1970s calling local Chicago radio stations for free ticket contests (and did in fact once snag some theater tickets). At worst, you got a busy signal. At best, it would ring and maybe someone would eventually answer. Never would you get an error message. If the phone company could handle massive simultaneous calls 50 years ago, they can handle it in 2021.

I haven’t seen my 91-year-old mother in over a year because of concerns about the virus. I’ve already missed Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas with my family back home. Getting this shot matters to me. I would love to be able to make it home for Greek Easter in early May. But I can’t do that, unless I get my first vaccine in the next few weeks. This is personal for me. Not to mention, we’re all in the midst of a deadly pandemic, so getting vaccinated matters on a basic health level as well.

What really gets my goat about all of this is that it didn’t have to be this way. We have known that a vaccine was coming for a year now. How long does it take to build a Web site that works? And, the site has been up for over a month — my friend used it to get our elderly neighbor registered — and she had the same Captcha error a good month ago (it was a subsequent day that she finally got through). Why isn’t it fixed one month later, and why are they even using Captcha at all?

DC had a similar disaster yesterday, Thursday, with the vaccine sign-ups. As a result, they’re having a do-over tomorrow (Saturday) for eligible residents in priority zip codes: