This repo documents some work I did to try and help during the initial rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine.
In December 2020, the Texas Department of State Health Services released a dashboard where users could find vaccine providers near them. This was helpful, but for actually figuring out if one could get the vaccine at a location, the recommendation was to just call the provider and ask.
I saw a post in the /r/Dallas subreddit from someone who had created a website to crowdsource information on the vaccine providers.
Things like
- which phases they were serving (1A or 1B)
- if there was a waitlist
- what the experience was like
Users could help add locations and report what information they might have gotten from calling a location so that others wouldn't have to. This was a brilliant use of technology to make things more efficient and reduce frustration.
I learned from the Reddit comments that the creator, Carri (@ccgirl), was entering the provider data herself and working tirelessly to ask others to help. Some commenters suggested finding a way to scrape the data, but it seemed no one had found an obvious or convenient way to do so.
I found this StackOverflow answer that was helpful, and by looking through the Network tab in the dev console while browsing the dashboard, I found a URL that would let me query the data. I wrote this simple Python script to make the right REST requests and generate a CSV for Carri.
You can see mention of me at https://www.findvaccineusa.com/thank-you. The original site was https://covid19vaccinetx.com -- see it at archive.org. Thank you to Carri for providing me with this opportunity to help.