BOSTON (WHDH) - The state has implemented a new “digital waiting room” for eligible residents looking to book one of the 50,000 new COVID-19 vaccination appointments that opened up Thursday morning.
Gov. Charlie Baker on Wednesday said he expected the state’s vaccine appointment scheduling website to be “significantly better” when the additional slots became available after tech teams spent the past week bolstering its ability to handle heavy traffic.
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“The site will bolster server capacity to manage heavier website traffic,” Baker said during a news conference that followed a tour of the state’s sixth mass vaccination site at the old Circuit City on State Road in Dartmouth. “Among other things, we’re implementing a digital waiting room, which is a feature to prevent outages on the scheduling website.”
Baker explained that some people looking to secure an appointment could be placed in the waiting room if there is high traffic on vaxfinder.mass.gov.
“The page will display more information on when you are allowed to proceed. It’s basically the equivalent of creating a line,” Baker said. “People would then move from their position in line on to the website when the next opportunity to be on the website becomes available.”
Baker said the state designed the waiting room to keep the site running and operating so residents can get through to secure an appointment with an uninterrupted experience.
“We certainly expect the site’s performance tomorrow to be significantly better,” Baker stated.
All of the new appointments that went live were for mass vaccination sites at Fenway Park and Gillette Stadium, and in Springfield, Danvers, Dartmouth, and Natick.
The website crashed last Thursday morning just as about one million more Massachusetts residents, including including people 65 years and older, people who have at least two comorbidities, and people who live and work in low-income or affordable senior housing facilities became eligible to schedule an appointment.
People visiting the website as the 70,000 appointments became available were met with a message that “this application had crashed.” Visitors were advised to try again shortly.
A heated Baker addressed the failure of the website during an interview on GBH’s “Boston Public Radio,” saying, “My hair’s on fire about the whole thing. I cannot even begin to tell you how pissed off I am.”
Baker later vowed, “It’s going to get fixed and I’m going to work very hard to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Officials expect the 50,000 appointments to get booked quickly, but Baker urged residents to remain patient until the federal government ups Massachusetts weekly vaccine allotment, which is currently 130,000 first doses.
“We certainly hope and anticipate that those numbers will change going forward,” Baker said.
A boost in weekly doses would allow officials to distribute more vaccines to mass vaccination sites and more appointments would open up, allowing the state to move more quickly through each phase of the vaccine rollout, according to Baker.
If the weekly vaccine allotment is not boosted, Baker said he expects that it will take about a month for everyone in Step 2 of Phase 2 of the rollout to get an initial dose.
Baker did say that he was encouraged by news about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine candidate as well as claims by Moderna and Pfizer officials about substantially boosting vaccine supplies.
The state also designated 11 new high-efficiency regional vaccination collaboratives as officials continue to work to streamline the vaccine rollout.
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