Frustrated with the difficulties faced in scheduling a vaccination appointment, a New York software engineer developed a website to make it easier for his fellow New Yorkers to schedule an appointment.
Huge Ma was trying to get a COVID vaccination appointment for his mother. “You had to basically open three tabs, one for each major government vaccine portal, and then refresh all day until you got an appointment,” the 31-year-old told The Guardian. This experience inspired him to create a website, Turbovax, that helped people to book their appointments more easily. After taking a “look under the hood” in January and doing two weeks of coding, he unveiled his website – essentially a bot that trawls relevant New York sites for appointments and shares them on Twitter and on a website.
Almost immediately, the website took off, with one million page views a day, with tens of thousand of people having booked appointments using the bot, Mr Ma estimated. People have even asked him to bring TurboVax to their cities.
“The response has been incredibly overwhelming,” he said. “There’s been so much gratitude. Hundreds, thousands of emails from people who have gotten appointments through TurboVax, which is honestly kind of just mind-blowing, and humbling as well.”
He was unprepared for the reaction. “I would never have thought that I could have built something that has such tangible impact on other people’s lives.”
However, running the site is difficult as Mr Ma has to balance this with his day job working at Airbnb, and the Google Docs-based site is buckling under the demand.
“Technically it’s kind of a hack. It’s not built in the way that modern websites are supposed to be built,” said Ma. “These are the shortcuts that we take to put something in the world that we think is useful and I think that’s a trade-off that I would still make.”
Though it is free, Mr Ma accepts donations and has gathered $35 000 so far. TurboVax is one of a number of citizen-led services that have popped up to help Americans deal with the difficulties of vaccine appointment bookings, such as NYC Vaccine List in New York and VaccinateCA in California.
Mr Ma shut down the website over the weekend in protest against a spate of hate crimes targetting Asian Americans, tweeting, “Anti-Asian hate crimes are out of control. I am taking a stand because I fear for my friends and family.” However, local law enforcements said there is no sign that a number of recent assaults against Asian Americans were racially motivated.
Since far more white people have received vaccinations than black or Latino people, Mr Ma said the technology can “help level the playing field”.
“Not everyone has the ability to sit in front of a computer and refresh all day,” he explained. “That said, I know that no system is perfect. This tech can help but it can’t solve other inequities in the system.”
Source: The Guardian
