In 45 minutes Thursday, the website recorded an astronomical 767,000 clicks as the county opened up 900 slots for coronavirus vaccine appointments. The vaccinations page got 480,000 clicks alone.
The onslaught was so great that the vaccination page crashed, automatically responding as if there had been a hacking attempt, County Executive Ryan McMahon said Thursday afternoon.
“The number of clicks and hits the (site) was getting, it thought the site was getting hacked,” McMahon said. “Thousands of clicks. I apologize for that.”
The website crashed at noon, just as Onondaga County promised to open up 900 slots for its county-run vaccination clinic. (Kinney Drugs opened up nearly another 1,000 slots at the same time, but on the drug store’s own website.)
Eventually, the website came back online and enough people were able to get through to fill the slots in minutes.
But McMahon said the incredible competition for slots shows just how far the vaccination rollout has to go. There are roughly 70,000 people in Onondaga County who qualify for vaccine right now, so the vast majority are being turned away.
“I’ve asked for 18,000 doses,” he said. “They sent us 1,000 doses.”
Last week, the site had problems handling 270,000 clicks for vaccine appointments. The county made improvements to its website, but did not predict the 767,000 clicks it received Thursday — all in 45 minutes, McMahon said.
Going forward, McMahon said that he’s going to plan on more than one million clicks next week, when appointments open again.
It’s unclear how many actual people those hundreds of thousands of clicks represent. Like a hot concert ticket or a video game console sweepstakes, some users might have refreshed the page in rapid succession, trying to get through.
As for concerns that outsiders might have gobbled up Onondaga County’s vaccine allotments — after all, there were more clicks Thursday that residents in the entire county — McMahon said interlopers would be weeded out through the vetting process.
FOUR MORE DEATHS OVERNIGHT
The county reported four more residents died overnight: an 88-year-old woman, a 78-year-old man and two nursing home residents, for which information was not available.But McMahon said that overall trends continue to be headed in the right direction, with the percentage of positive tests going down and a total of 159 new cases — a low number for recent months.
The number of Covid-19 patients in local hospitals decreased by 12. There were still 30 people in intensive care.
McMahon said the numbers suggest that Onondaga County is doing slightly better than the state’s other major population centers.
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