I’ve been trying for three days to get an Appointment for a COVID-19 inoculation. I’m beginning to think I have a better chance of buying a winning Mega-Millions lottery ticket.
My own doctors are at Weill-Cornell Medical Center, part of New York Presbyterian Hospital. Weill-Cornell has a vast campus of hospital skyscrapers on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. New York Presbyterian has hospitals and sites in Washington Heights in upper Manhattan, and in lower Manhattan, and in the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens.
So where do they have their inoculation sites to help their patients from three of the city’s five boroughs?
One cheesy, out-of-the-way
inoculation site for
a vast
hospital systemInoculation sites? The plural? Hah! There’s only one site. They’ve stuck in in an armory in the distant reaches of Upper Manhattan, an inconvenience to anyone who doesn’t live in the neighborhood, or along a couple of West Side subway lines. I live near Midtown on the East Side of Manhattan. I’d need to take a cross town bus, and then a long, long subway ride, and then a bit of a hike to get to the armory.
But okay. I need that shot. I’m in a double high-risk category. In the first place I’m over 65 — way over 65. I’m 81 years old. And second, I’m immuno-compromised. I’m suffering from chronic lymphatic leukemia. So you’d think it would be easy.
Sorry. You can’t get an appointment at the armory. None available. Period. Never mind that it could be a two hour trip on public transportation (most New Yorkers don’t own cars) to get to the one out-of-the-way site the hospital is offering. There’s no way to get the shot without an appointment, and after three days of trying, I’ve concluded there’s no way to get an appointment.
How about at the city’s Bellevue Hospital, which is only a few blocks from where I live? Same bad news. No appointments available. And ditto a couple of other sites I’ve tried.
Fill out some forms.
Then fill out some forms. And then
fill out some forms.
Incidentally, each time I go to a site I have to fill out a questionnaire before I can ask for an appointment. My name. My date of birth. My address. Certain questions about my medical history. Questions about my ethnicity. (No, I don’t know why they need to know my ethnicity before they can give me a shot either.) Then, the site tells me there are no appointments. It does so either by saying so, or by leaving me staring at an image of a beating heart for an hour until I give up, or by crashing.
Want to try another site? You go through the same infuriating rigamarole again. You want to go back to Columbia-Presbyterian to try again? Or to make a second, third, or seventeenth try at any other site? You have to fill out the forms all over again.
So a few questions:
Why do the hospitals of Columbia-Presbyterian, that were permitted to merge into vast, conglomerated hospital systems, feel that a single, out-of-the-way armory in the outer reaches of upper Manhattan is sufficient for administering shots that could be a matter of life and death for many of its patients around the city?
Have they grown so big that they’ve become too unwieldy to function with any efficiency in a pandemic?
What’s that, Columbia-Presbyterian? You feel you don’t have the space elsewhere? How about that vast lobby in the multi-gazillion dollar skyscraper building at 1305 York Avenue, donated by one of New York’s least-loved billionaires, David H. Koch? What’s that? Koch’s humongous lobby can’t be sullied by the hoi-polloi standing around in line for their shots?
Okay, I understand. So how about emptying out one of the huge underground parking garages you have in your Weill-Cornell Medical Center? Oh, I know it’ll inconvenience the doctors. But what you’re saying by not making some of that garage space available is that it’s more important to make sure the doctors can drive to work instead of taking public transportation than it is to save lives.
A callback system? Hah!
And why, New York Presbyterian, can’t a poor desperate patient leave his or her name and contact information with you and have you get back to them with an appointment, in the order the request was made? Especially when the alternative is to spend futile hours, day after day, trying to somehow, somewhere, land an appointment for a COVID-19 shot.
Ditto you, Bellevue Hospital. And you, New York City Department of Health on Worth Street in Lower Manhattan, where it’s also impossible to get an appointment as of this writing. And you, the Ryan Center on 10th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. And on and on.
Cuomo and DeBlasio—
take a bow for
incompetenceThe fault for this ongoing SNAFU needs to be shared by New York’s Govenor Cuomo, and the city’s Mayor DeBlasio, and the administrators of all the public and private not-for-profit hospitals in the city. There appears to be no strategic planning. No attempt to take appointments more two or three weeks in advance. No attempt to make a record of who attempts to apply and then get back to them.
In short Cuomo, and DeBlasio, and the hospitals are as incompetent and as screwed up as the Trump Administration’s famously failed vaccine team and the Trump PPE team. Maybe Jared Kushner has a future as a New York hospital administrator. Or on Governor Cuomo's staff. It seems to me he’d fit right in.
Sadly, the consequence of this incompetence is going to be vulnerable people who not only can’t get a shot, but who may contract COVID and die of it before they can even get an appointment for an innoculation.
