Most people I know had a very frustrating time signing up for a test or a vaccine, even if they were in the right category. Those who were computer savvy had a slightly easier time, but not even the telephone scheduling was any better. There were long lines, confusing instructions, delays, and people without a car or a computer were particularly impacted. What would be a better way to sign people up? We knew the vaccines were coming. We had months of prior notice, but most counties and states were preoccupied with testing and contact tracing. I would think a single national hotline would be best and most consistent. It wouldn’t require a computer, only a phone, and most people have access to some type of phone. The hotline would direct you to a state or county-based resource and there would have to be enough resources to staff those lines adequately so the wait time would not be too long. Medicare has a single number for calls and most national companies have a single customer service number. It shouldn’t be impossible if we plan ahead.
Another thing we will have to do better is distribute the vaccines more equitably and quickly. Having different distribution methods in every state and even in every county has caused chaos. I would love to hear your ideas about it, but I imagine that we could learn a lot from Amazon about how to deliver “prime” service. Locating vaccines where people live and worship would help, as would mobile vans that could cruise underserved neighborhoods like an ice cream truck. Hopefully we will learn from our experience about what worked and what did not. Was it helpful to distribute through pharmacy chains or should we have distributed through local pharmacies? Did the private sector do it better than counties?
If we want to avoid the delays we had this time, we should be ready to do better, quicker testing for the next virus. Testing was so slow and difficult in the beginning, it was like trying to lift a 747 into the air with a few people pushing! The fact that we still do not have approval for the rapid, at-home COVID-19 tests that have been awaiting review at the FDA since last August is a scandal. One company, Innova, based in Pasadena, California, has an antigen test that would cost less than $5 and they have been awaiting FDA approval since last summer. If we all could test at the beginning of an epidemic and more frequently and economically, we could stop the spread a lot faster.
Another thing we could do better is to explain things more clearly and effectively. We should have had a national ad campaign last year in March about wearing masks and staying 6 feet apart. We have a nation of ad experts who could announce remedies much more quickly next time. We didn’t use social media nearly as well as we could have. By the time information flowed, there was so much confusion and so much MISinformation out there, it was hard to clean up the inaccurate messaging.
One thing that we did well this time was to work with the world’s scientists to develop vaccines fast — Operation WarpSpeed was truly amazing. The fact that multiple companies developed vaccines that were over 90% effective shows the power of our science, our ingenuity, and the cooperation of the world’s scientists, including China that released the genomic information quickly.
It has been a year now since our first cases emerged, and we have lost valuable time pretending everything was just fine and making wear a mask a political statement. For all those who died and shouldn’t have, it is more than sad, it’s a tragedy. However, we have learned a lot and with good leadership we should be more ready next time. Maybe we will all be so much healthier now, washing our hands as we do, wearing masks in public, that the next virus won’t have such a good chance of bringing us to our knees. On the other hand, by staying inside, we might not have immunity to the usual seasonal diseases! What do YOU think we could do better next time?