CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — There was another vaccination registration with more problems for the people of Corpus Christi, but city officials say nothing went wrong.
At 10 a.m. Monday, people that fall into Phase 1A and 1B were ready to register for a COVID-19 vaccine.
Some people were on their computers, others on mobile devices and some used both. But for some, this was anything but smooth.
Several people told KRIS 6 News, the vaccination website kicked them out in the middle of registering. Melinda McQueen says she was nearly finished multiple times, but was booted from the web page or got an error message.
"If they’re not going to let you get all the way through the program, then don’t give you access to start with," said McQueen, a local resident who tried to register. "So, it’s not fair. It’s just like the mess up last week, letting too many people and this week they’re disconnecting people."
The City of Corpus Christi put out a statement that said 1,000 people were registered in 10 minutes. There was no malfunction. The chief information officer said it’s simply more demand for little supply. Roughly 100,000 people logged on to register Monday.
"It will be increasing," said Peter Collins. the chief information officer for the City of Corpus Christi, "I know everybody else is working very hard to increase the supply. But yes, I could see everybody competing for those thousand slots, registration opportunities and then all of a sudden in a blink of an eye, they don’t have it."
Some people saw the message "Server unavailable. Please try again." Collins said that was a problem and the wrong message. It made people think something had gone wrong.
In fact, that was intended by Luminare's Innoculate program. It's the program the city has been using to track vaccination registration and information. The message has already been changed to now say "Registration has been filled."
"The city needs to re-look at the procedure and the computer programs," McQueen said. "Somebody has to know what’s going on that’s allowing these mistakes to happen."
Later in the afternoon, McQueen was surprised to learn she had been confirmed and registered as one of the 1,000 eligible for inoculations. She said she never saw a confirmation page Monday morning.
A total of 3,000 people will be vaccinated Tuesday. It will consist of 1,000 from this online registration, 1,000 from hot-line call-ins from the weekend and 1,000 of the people who were registered by mistake last week when there were no spots for them.
Collins said the glitch that happened last week that overbooked so many people, was just that, a glitch. He assures it won’t happen again.