State pledges 15,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses per week to clinic operators serving Portland-area seniors

STORY UPDATED 6 P.M.: This story has been updated to reflect that the actual increase in doses for seniors at the Oregon Convention Center is unclear.

The Oregon Health Authority announced it will provide large clinic providers at least 15,000 COVID-19 doses a week for three weeks to vaccinate seniors 65 and older in Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas and Columbia counties.

It’s unclear how large of an increase that is compared to overall vaccination doses currently being allocated each week to the operators of clinics at the Oregon Convention Center and Portland International Airport. The state and the local health care providers running the mass vaccination sites didn’t answer questions Monday about the numbers.

Officials also announced they have made an important change to the way Portland-area seniors schedule appointments at the Convention Center. Seniors still must register and wait to be randomly selected from the state’s getvaccinated.oregon.gov registry. But once selected, seniors will no longer have to wait for a phone call from an overburdened call center to schedule an appointment. Rather, they will be emailed an individualized link which they can use to select from available appointment times and book appointments on their own, state officials said.

The changes come after the state unveiled its new lottery system last week. The Convention Center’s vaccination site booked only 1,950 new appointments through that system, with call-center workers contacting Oregonians and booking appointments manually.

“To improve upon this manual and time intensive process, this new approach will now allow for much faster (appointments) and at higher volumes, which will be needed as vaccine supply expands,” reads a news release Monday.

While the Oregon Health Authority said in a news release that it’s committed to allocating at least 15,000 doses to the operators of the Convention Center clinic, a state spokesman said that figure “may include” doses going to the mass vaccination site at Portland International Airport. The clinics are jointly operated by Oregon Health & Science University, Legacy Health, Providence Health & Services and Kaiser Permanente.

The Health Authority described last week’s 1,950 scheduled appointments at the Convention Center as “a successful weekend pilot” — yet some seniors said that it took 48 hours to more than 72 hours before the call center contacted them, they couldn’t get through to a live person on 211 to ask questions, or they didn’t receive an email confirming their appointments.

Others were disappointed that they weren’t selected at all and said the process was moving far too slowly. Still, many were relieved they didn’t have to compete online for appointments at a set time — and endure a sluggish website that froze up at times or booted them off, as it had in past weeks.

Health Authority Director Patrick Allen has said he expects 70% to 75% of seniors will have received their first doses by the end of March. Right now, about 42% of Oregonians 65 and older have received at least one dose.

Portland-area health care providers have designated the Convention Center for vaccinations for seniors without mobility issues. The providers say a visit to the Convention Center may involve standing or waiting for one to two hours.

Seniors with mobility issues are asked to try to schedule appointments at the Portland area’s other mass vaccination location, the airport’s drive-thru vaccination site — where many people scheduled for shots spent hours in their cars Saturday. To book an appointment there, seniors are still required to go online at 9 a.m. on Mondays and Thursdays to try to get a vaccination time.

This Monday, as has been the case for the past few Mondays and Thursday, upcoming appointments at the airport were gone in 10 to 15 minutes.

It’s unclear which appointment-registration system the state and local health care providers will use come March 29, when hundreds of thousands of Oregonians ages 45 and older with underlying conditions — as well as people who are homeless and frontline workers such as agricultural workers — will be eligible for vaccinations.

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— Aimee Green; [email protected]; @o_aimee