150K seniors tried to book COVID vaccine appointments in first day, 25K successful

For a period of time Wednesday morning, the website had crashed and some callers were unable to get through to a representative.

Some frustrated Albertans even phoned the LNN, Country 95.5, and B93.3 office to complain about the booking situation.

Approximately 25,000 were successful in booking appointments.

Shandro told Albertans that he understands their frustrations with those who were unable to book their immunization appointments.

“To everybody who was disappointed this morning, I want to say that I’m with you. AHS is fixing the problems with the booking system as fast as they can and they’ll catch up quickly.”

“The system can now handle about 5,000 bookings per hour. AHS has added network capacity, they’ve added staff to Health Link, they are working with Telus to make sure that any intermittent busy signals some Telus subscribers were dealing with this morning is no longer a problem.”

Shandro assures that, while they were not able to get to everyone on the first day, they will get to everyone sooner rather than later.

He is urging Albertans to be patient and to understand that they are trying to tackle the high levels of demand promptly.

“We are getting a bit over 50,000 doses per week and we have 230,000 seniors to cover at two doses apiece. It’s going to take about a month to get first doses to all of these seniors.”

Dr. Deena Hinshaw said yesterday that AHS hopes to vaccine all seniors 75 years or older who want to be immunized by the end of March.

The minister also announced that select pharmacies in Calgary, Red Deer, and Edmonton will start offering COVID-19 vaccines next week.

This will eventually expand to other centres across the province.

186,572 doses of COVID-19 vaccine had been administered in Alberta as of the end of February 23.

by David Opinko

150K seniors tried to book COVID vaccine appointments in first day, 25K successful

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