According to Smart Quarantine, over 44,000 reservations were made within the first hour after the system’s launch. While all dates for vaccinations are now booked, more places will become available with the delivery of new vaccines. Photo credit: Freepik / Illustrative photo.
Czech Rep., Jan 15 (BD) – The central reservation system for booking coronavirus vaccinations became operational at 8am this morning. It was reported that the available dates had all been booked after about an hour. Complications with the mass sending of SMS notifications to applicants were also reported.
According to the vaccination strategy, the system is primarily aimed at helping applicants older than 80 years to register, of whom there are around 441,000 in the country. Registration for the general public to reserve vaccination dates should begin from February 1st.
The first step to register for vaccination is to enter a contact number to receive a pin-code via SMS. Operators only learned of the requirement for SMS verification after the system launch.
Jiří Grund, Executive Director of APMS (Association of Mobile Network Operators), said that it would have helped operators to know about the SMS verifications earlier. At 8:35am, Chytrá karanténa (Smart Quarantine) announced on Twitter that 20 SMS were being sent per second. After the problem was identified, operators increased the capacity of the SMS channel to 200 SMS per second.
Prime Minister Andrej Babiš (ANO) told the press today that he was not involved in informing operators about the SMS verification: “If someone talked to the operators or did not talk, I can’t answer that. I don’t deal with this.”
The national 1221 helpline, which supports those with reservations, also experienced an enormous influx of calls this morning.
Smart Quarantine tweeted that 65,000 people had registered for vaccinations within hours of the launch. While vaccination dates are now fully booked, it is still possible to register for vaccination without selecting a date.
