[tdeck]

I'm not making a judgment on this situation, but as someone who lives in Alameda County (where Oakland is) and tried hard to get a vaccine as early as I ethically could, I can definitely confirm that this rollout was very confusing. The county and my city (Berkeley) kept on saying it wouldn't be available to the general public until the 15th. Then they changed the eligibility on the 10th, but with zero fanfare and without all of the websites being updated. I believe MyTurn wasn't even updated for a while. I was checking periodically and only happened to notice on the 11th. I also heard about these "certain ZIP code" vaccination centers and assumed that they probably weren't "for" me (not my ZIP code), but there wasn't much clarity.

I understand why the county probably did some of these things: they want to make the vaccine available to underserved communities without asking for documents that are typically a barrier for members of those same communities. They want to make it easy to get a vaccine, but not talk about it too much so people don't flood in from other areas. But it does leave you in a weird quandry when you want to do your part and line up when the time comes to get vaccinated, and the question of "is it time yet" isn't exactly clear.

In my case I didn't get the shot until the 16th, but I'm so glad I got it at all.