Elliott: Ontario experimenting with online COVID-19 vaccine portal to avoid crash when it opens

By Lucas Casaletto

Ontarians can’t yet access an online system for booking COVID-19 vaccination appointments because the province wants to ensure it won’t crash when it’s launched.

Health Minister Christine Elliott says the system has been piloted but more tests must be done to ensure it can withstand the large volume of requests expected.

She says the province doesn’t want to “rush to failure” with the system.

“We want to make sure that when the system is ready it’s not going to crash which has happened in other jurisdictions,” said Elliott.

The head of the province’s vaccine task force has said that people aged 80 and older will be able to access the system when it becomes available on March 15.

“Unless you’re 80 years old, or unless you’re acting to get a reservation for somebody who’s 80 years old or more, please do not go online,” said retired Gen. Rick Hillier on Wednesday.


RELATED: Ford government taking heat for confusing vaccine rollout


A telephone booking system will also be available.

Elliott says Ontario is still working through its highest priority groups for vaccinations and it may take “another short while” to get to the 80 and older group immediately after the system opens.

Experts said that the government should have been able to have the site up and running earlier.

Nancy Walton, a professor of nursing at Ryerson University with a specialization in mobile technologies, said the province has had plenty of time to plan its vaccine rollout and could have launched the web portal well in advance of the appointments that will be booked through it.

“Rolling out that plan and setting up an online portal with a call centre ahead of time seems reasonable,” she said.

There are a number of things the government must take into account when building such a system, not the least of which is accessibility, she said.

People who are not particularly tech-savvy – including those who are older and didn’t grow up around computers – should be able to navigate the system intuitively, she said, noting that could tack on time to the development process.

Eyal de Lara, a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto, said the site also has to be accessible to people with disabilities – and specifically must work with screen readers used by people who are blind.

That tends to be lower on the to-do list for private corporations building websites, rightly or wrongly, he said.

The province’s site also should be accessible to people who don’t speak English or French as a first language, he noted.

Opposition leaders criticized the announcement that the portal was still weeks away contending that other province already has their online portals up and running.

“The premier is grasping at straws for excuses as to why he doesn’t have a proper plan in place but this is how this government has rolled since day one,” NDP leader Andrea Horwath said.

“When it comes to COVID-19, they have never been able to get out ahead with actions to slow down the spread.”

Liberal leader Steven Del Duca reacted to the province’s updated vaccine rollout, saying Premier Doug Ford is in over his head.

Quebec began taking appointments Thursday to begin vaccinating those 85 and older. While most inoculations are scheduled to begin next week, Laval, north of Montreal, began right away.

The province said it had administered 8,300 doses of vaccine on Wednesday for a total of 387,076 shots to date, reaching about four percent of the population.


With files from Nicole Thompson of The Canadian press

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