Frustration Is Spreading Faster Than the Vaccine Is
If you are the child of elderly parents in parts of the United States right now, and if you are trying to get them a COVID-19 vaccine, you are living in a shortage economy, a world of queues and rumors, a shadowy land of favoritism and incompetence—a world not unlike the world of the very late, very stifling, Brezhnev-era Soviet Union.
Picture the scene: We’re on opposite sides of the country, but at 3:59 p.m. eastern time, my sisters and I are sitting in front of our respective laptops, poised to start clicking on the website of Holy Cross Hospital in Montgomery County, Maryland. Every few days at 4 p.m.,the site releases a new batch of COVID-19 vaccine appointments, and we’re hoping to score two for our parents. The game is to get through the preliminary pages, to answer pointless questions (Why does it matter what Then the page went blank and showed an error message. When I tried again, all of the appointments were gone. It was 4:06 p.m. One of my sisters gave up, she told me later, at 4:07. She’d had two tabs open, trying to do two applications at once, one for each parent.
