photo by: August Rudisell/Special to the Journal-World

Vehicles line up at the Douglas County Fairgrounds, where residents were receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, on Friday, Jan. 29, 2020, in Lawrence, Kan.

The director of Douglas County’s health department said Wednesday that there is a potential problem with its system for signing people up for COVID-19 vaccinations during Phase 2.

The sign-up system, which involves entering a registration code into a website, relies on people honoring the system by not giving out codes to those who do not qualify, said Dan Partridge, director of Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health.

The website to sign up for a vaccine, ldchealth.org/getmyvaccine, requires a registration code. Partridge said there are unique codes for each organization that is scheduled to receive vaccines. An example of an organization, he said, would be a school district or county government. Groups that were scheduled to receive vaccines as part of a Phase 2 vaccination clinic on Wednesday included workers in the K-12 education sector, food service workers, essential workers in local government and workers critical to the functioning of the community.

The health department distributed a unique registration code to a point of contact in each qualifying organization within these sectors, as well as the number of vaccination slots associated with that code. The point of contact was then supposed to distribute the code to people within its organization, up to the number of slots available. But if the point of contact or one of the employees shared the code with someone outside of the organization, then there’s a possibility that people who did not qualify for Phase 2 could have taken one of the organization’s slots, Partridge said.

“That’s why people need to honor the process,” he said. Partridge also noted that the problem would be contained within that organization.

After signing up for a slot using the code from their organization, registrants receive a QR code, which is the only thing they need to present to receive a vaccine at the clinic. On Wednesday, a vaccination clinic was scheduled to occur from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. at the Douglas County Fairgrounds.

“This is our first clinic for this group of people, so we did talk about it and anticipate that this might happen,” Partridge said of the possibility of people sharing the code. “We’re going to find out today how big of a problem it might be. We’ll respond as best we can based on how big of a problem we see it being.”

Wednesday afternoon at 4 p.m., Partridge said it would take a couple days before the health department could determine whether or not people who did not qualify for Phase 2 were vaccinated in error at Wednesday’s event.

Partridge said that since there are unique codes, the health department would be able to identify from which organization a problem stemmed, and communicate the issue with that organization and ask them to fix it.

The health department is scheduled to give out 1,020 vaccines at Wednesday’s vaccine clinic.

In other vaccine news, Partridge said the health department and its pharmacy partners are working on vaccinating the senior living communities that were not vaccinated in Phase 1. He said the health department has agreements in place with five or six pharmacies, and that some of the pharmacies have clinics scheduled for this week.

“That’s well on its way,” Partridge said.