SHA online vaccination system back up and running after crash

Saskatchewan’s online booking system for COVID-19 vaccinations started taking appointments for kids aged five to 11 at 8 o’clock Tuesday morning.

Within 10 minutes, the system had crashed.

“There was about a 30-minute downtime related to high traffic on the site,” Sheila Anderson, the vaccine chief responsible for the Saskatchewan Health Authority’s COVID-19 immunization campaign, said during a conference call. “The system was down and when it was down, the public would have experienced an error message.

“It has been resolved and the system is operating now as expected. We were working together with the vendor and we don’t anticipate that problem to happen again.

“Our booking system has performed very well over the whole course of the campaign, so we’ll be monitoring it closely for the issue to happen again.”

The Saskatchewan government announced Monday it was planning to start vaccinating kids in that age group starting Wednesday. Appointments were to be available Tuesday morning.

Anderson said the system had undergone “a really rigorous testing process” before the launch, but it still was overwhelmed by the demand.

“I know it was a really exciting morning for many parents and caregivers and guardians who wanted to book their loved ones in, so apologies that the system wasn’t operating as expected,” Anderson said.

When the system did come back online, it accepted more than 12,000 appointment requests between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. There are more than 40,000 appointments available.

The SHA’s SaskVax phone line also had an issue — people on hold didn’t hear music, but rather just dead air — but it too was resolved.

Anderson said people interested in making consecutive appointments should call the SaskVax line at 1-833-727-5829. People can make group bookings online, but the appointments may not be one after the other.

Dr. Saqib Shahab, the province’s chief medical health officer, said vaccinating kids aged five to 11 will lower the province’s overall case numbers and also could protect children under the age of five — the only group that currently isn’t eligible to get a shot.

As of Monday, there had been 13,529 cases in the under-11 age group in Saskatchewan.

Public health measures

Premier Scott Moe has suggested that current public health measures in the province will be extended to the end of the year when they expire, while some physicians have said the measures shouldn’t be lifted until the spring.

Shahab said Saskatchewan isn’t out of the woods with the fourth wave of COVID, so he believes things should remain the way they are.

“(Number) one is yes, continue to use your mask indoors throughout the winter, well into March,” Shahab said. “Number two, we’ve seen how powerful proof of vaccination is.

“This is not a fall and winter like last year. We are having concerts, we are having games with thousands of people attending. As far as we can see, as long as there’s the proof of vaccination or proof of negative test result being used in these large gatherings, we are not seeing for the most part large transmission chains — and that is so important.”

Shahab said health officials expect pushback from unvaccinated people, something which he doesn’t understand given the impact of the fourth wave on the province.

As of Tuesday, 87 per cent of eligible Saskatchewan residents had received one dose and 81 per cent had got both shots.

“It’s still hard to understand why a significant minority remains unvaccinated,” Shahab said. “But even with a small proportion of the population unvaccinated, we can still see significant surges.”

Certain areas of the province continue to have low uptake numbers and Anderson said the SHA will keep trying to convince those people who are hesitant to get a shot.

“We’re going to continue to work with those communities (and) work with community leaders for as long as it takes to continue to get our uptake, our percentage of rates of vaccinated communities, up,” she said. “We will continue to just do some of the same work that we’re doing right now.”

Resumption of services

Marlo Pritchard, the president of the Saskatchewan Public Safety Agency, said during the call that 79 per cent of health-care workers who were redeployed to handle the surge of COVID cases are back at their previous jobs.

As well, 193 of the 395 services that were slowed in September have fully resumed and 68 have partially resumed.

Pritchard also noted surgical volumes in Prince Albert, Lloydminster, Melfort, Nipawin, Humboldt, Estevan, Weyburn, Kindersley and Rosetown were back to 100 per cent, and third-party surgical providers are working at more than 100 per cent.

However, 36,000 people are waiting for non-emergency surgeries in Saskatchewan — and SHA chief of emergency operations Derek Miller said that has to be addressed.

Getting COVID patients healthy and out of ICU beds in Regina and Saskatoon will do just that.

“We do need to see the ICU in particular and also the acute numbers continue to decrease in Saskatoon and Regina to allow us to move forward more quickly with service resumption, in surgeries in particular,” Miller said.

“We are definitely planning on doing that and we want to be able to implement that as quickly as possible as we see that COVID demand continuing to diminish in the weeks ahead.”