This is completely off topic, but I put a lot of thought into it, and I would like to share it.
In the U.S., thousands more people will die because the vaccines already on hand are not being administered quickly. If the vaccination program had been properly organized, this could have been avoided. This should have been done months ago. I, or any other superannuated programmer, would know how to avoid this mess. Once again we see the cost of ignorance, incompetence, and not letting experts do their jobs. The rollout of the vaccine in Georgia is the worst in the US. Only 23% of the vaccines have been administered. The feds are threatening to withhold additional doses until this mess is straightened out. Rural hospitals are getting more doses than they can use and throwing out unused ones, while some urban hospitals have gotten nothing. This is caused by incompetent leadership and by the fact that our healthcare system is fragmented and chaotic in the best of times. The hospitals are filthy and they often cause nosocomial infections. Billing is ridiculous. Some have sent me the same bill 3 or 4 times after I pay it. So, it is no surprise they cannot handle vaccination. The county and drug store websites say they cannot accept appointment applications for at least 2 weeks. My doctor's office sent me a form today to sign up for a vaccination appointment. They actually advised me to sign up with CVS and with the county health systems as well! If people do that, there will be double and triple duplicate registrations and many people will not show up for the appointments. I was able to register myself, and I got an email response within minutes. But when I went back to get an appointment for my wife the system did not work. No response. I called the telephone number but they said they could do nothing. I do not know why they are having physical difficulty transporting and administering the vaccinations. The news reports have been sketchy. The feds have no idea how many doses they have in stock. They gave the states the wrong information a week ago. In Georgia it seems they have no idea where the vaccines are, how many are needed, or how to distribute them, and they cannot find people to administer them. There may be other difficulties I have not read about. I cannot judge what physical problems they are having, but now that I have tried to sign up, I can see the problems with the data processing. In 1979 I was programming 64 KB minicomputers to do municipal applications rather similar to this, such as keeping track of water bills in small cities. These machines could process hundreds of thousands of transactions a month. If you gave me one of those machines today, I could probably set up an effective system to register everyone in Atlanta, and to assign an appointment. It would work with printed text on punch cards, which were mailed out to households. Nowadays the transaction goes over the internet, but the principle is the same. It would collect applications, sort them, assign an appointment, and mail back the confirmation card to the patient, along with a cancellation card. Given the speed of those computers it would probably run many hours overnight in batch processing, and then print out and mail the cards the next day. This task can now be done in real time. But again, the principle is the same. I would have a file of patients with names, address, date of birth and so on, and a file of providers such as hospitals and drugstores, with the number of vaccinations each is capable of doing per day. I would work out application specific details such as how to contact people after 1 p.m. when some people have not come for their scheduled appointments and extra doses are available. I would use zip codes to assign patients to the closest provider. In other words, I could spec out a system for doing this in a few days. I could tell the programmers how to make a better system than we have in Georgia. I could have done this back in April 2020, and we would have had the whole thing up and running long before the vaccine became available. This is Data Processing 101. It is the sort of thing people like me have been doing since the 1960s. It is not rocket science. Bill Gates and I (the same age) were both doing stuff like this in high school. Yet no data processing system like this was ready in December. Not in Georgia, and not in the Federal government. None of this is working now. Not at the state level, the hospital I go to, or any drug store. Problems such as combining the registration and the appointment allocation functions should be obvious to any programmer. They are idiotic mistakes. This is a travesty.
