A gap in Utah’s scheduling system for vaccination appointments prompted officials to cancel thousands of people’s appointments because they were not part of the approved designated groups that were permitted to take timeslots, the Associated Press reports.
The state system neglected to filter out people who were not elderly or who did not have the prerequisite pre-existing conditions required for people in the state’s current phase of distribution, allowing more than 7,000 ineligible people to fill the available slots.
Because of the need for deep freeze storage of the currently available vaccines, patients just schedule appointments to make sure sufficient doses are thawed and readied for injection. This causes a bottleneck in scheduling, as more people attempt to schedule appointments than there are available doses.