Arizona's confusing vaccination website is in line for an upgrade (fingers crossed)

Good news: Arizona’s COVID-19 vaccine registration portal may finally become more intuitive and user-friendly.

A slew of changes are expected to go live on Jan. 29. Bugs should be fixed that kept some from scheduling their second vaccine doses, state health director Cara Christ says.

Appointments also will be shown by the dates they are available, so registrants won’t have to search on random days to find what’s open.

Presuming everything works as described, it should go a long way toward making registration easier. And that’s critical, especially for the most vulnerable Arizonans who have been repeatedly flummoxed by – and shut out of – this process.

Prove you can vaccinate, or return doses

Meanwhile, Gov. Doug Ducey is ratcheting up the pressure on local providers that have been slow to administer the vaccines they have received. Arizona lags many states, having only administered a little more than half of supplies on hand.

That’s unacceptable.

Ducey is requiring any provider that has received more than 1,000 doses and has not yet administered at least 40% of them to submit a report by Jan. 28 explaining how they will get to 80% in seven days.

Those that don’t submit a report must hand their doses back to the state for reallocation. And those with inadequate plans to reach that target will be asked to surrender their doses.

Counties that haven’t used 40% or more of their allocations won’t get more doses until they’ve used 80% of their inventory.

At least state sites can do this quickly

Any returned doses would likely go to state-run vaccination sites at State Farm Stadium in Glendale and Phoenix Municipal Stadium, which opens Feb. 1. Christ says the latter could administer up to 12,000 shots a day – the same as the 24/7 Glendale site – but only has enough doses to offer 500 a day.

Moving doses to these sites won’t do rural Arizona any favors, but at least appointments could be scaled up immediately. In fact, the State Farm Stadium site has been so successful at pumping out shots that Christ says it is poised to become the blueprint for the 100 mass vaccination sites the feds are planning to set up in states.

Arizona also plans to replicate the model statewide, eventually creating seven major vaccination sites that are supported by smaller, more targeted efforts among high-risk populations who are less able to travel.

It just needs more vaccine to do so.

More doses, predictability should help

President Joe Biden promised on Jan. 26 to boost state vaccine allocations by 1.4 million a week (though his administration recently denied Arizona’s request for 300,000 more doses, and it’s unclear how many of the 1.4 million we might be in line to receive).

Biden also has promised states a three-week outlook for doses. That’s much better than the current week-to-week system, which makes it exceedingly difficult to set vaccination site staffing, hours and appointments.

Whether any of this is truly good news depends on how it plays out.

If the website remains a confusing mess, if the governor’s new order doesn’t result in more appointments or if we ultimately don’t get more doses to stand up new sites, we’ll be back at square one, with an effort that threatens to push people away from vaccination, at a time when we need everyone to roll up a sleeve.

But we challenged Christ and Ducey to get more shots in arms.

Fingers crossed that their efforts pay off.

This is an opinion of The Arizona Republic's editorial board. What do you think? Send us a letter to the editor to weigh in.