Sabbatical Experiment #3: Volunteering at a COVID-19 Mass Vaccination Site
How I disabused myself of a future in public service
Using my time off to help curb the pandemic, perhaps a defining event of my lifetime, felt like the most important way to serve after leaving my corporate career.
I started looking for opportunities to help with newly emerging vaccination efforts. I had no medical training or background, but I had 20 years of airline operations experience. This involved complex logistical planning and crisis management. Surely these skills were transferrable?
Finding an opportunity to volunteer at our local mass vaccination site felt like doing my part in my generation’s version of World War II Homefront efforts.
The site consisted of multiple tented drive-through lanes in a giant fairgrounds parking lot. Other than a few portable buildings for personnel coordination and supplies, everything was outdoors. It was also spring in North Texas, which brings four seasons in one day (or at least week).
Armed with layers of clothing and sun protection, I arrived for my first afternoon shift on Monday, March 1, 2021, with no idea what to expect.
I parked in the giant open field, now parking lot, and walked across the 18 vaccination drive-through lanes to find the volunteer building. I asked around and eventually found the QR code to sign in for my shift. I received my assignment by hopping on the golf cart when a driver said “I need five people.” For what?
After swerving around the parking lot while I held on for dear life, the driver let me off to direct traffic in the post-vaccination waiting area. Another first-time volunteer who had been working the morning shift trained me.
As cars pulled into the vaccination lanes, we waited for them to get the shots, then waived them through to “waiting lanes” where we marked their 15-minute release times on their windshields. We guided those with special conditions (still unclear on how that was determined) to the 30-minute waiting lane. Volunteers walked around the waiting lots checking on the recently vaccinated. If someone didn’t feel well, we put a cone on top of the car, honked their horns, and signaled paramedics to drive the ambulance over. This happened a few times. Once the time on their windshield came up, we waived them out to the street. Dodging cars was an essential function of our role.
People had been waiting in their cars for hours before being vaccinated. Some yelled at us for requiring them to wait another 15 minutes for observation. One man gave me a long lecture on how things could be more efficient.
Duh.
Confusion swirled about who was in charge, who could answer questions. Without anyone to ask, we often made things up as we went along. We apologized frequently.
After a similar experience on my next shift, I felt compelled to do something.
Raising My Hand
I messaged the person who ran the volunteer Facebook group page, offering my 20 years’ experience in airline logistics to help with coordination. He promoted me to “Volunteer Coordinator” and added me to their coordinator email group and schedule. I spoke with several friends who had volunteered to gather feedback on how we could improve processes and communication. I came to my first Volunteer Coordinator shift with ideas and enthusiasm.
That enthusiasm tempered quickly.
New ideas were, let’s say, unwelcome. In reality, my new role entailed greeting volunteers, checking hours, and spraying/folding safety vests. I did my best to make volunteers feel welcome, valued, and clear about their daily duties.
Over the next two months, I better understood what those running the site had been dealing with and the heroic nature of their efforts. Since January, many of the Dallas County employees had been working 12-hour days, 6 days a week to begin vaccinating our county’s most vulnerable population. The local Lion’s Club and several other faithful volunteers had been serving and navigating the chaos since the beginning.
When I started volunteering, they had been soliciting community volunteers by offering vaccines to those who served at least 15 hours. This brought people in hordes, as the coveted (by some) vaccine was not yet widely available. People would fill up the volunteer slots online as soon as they became available.
The day of my first volunteer shift, the federal government, including FEMA and at least two military branches, had just arrived, more than doubling the operation’s size. Many cooks were in this kitchen.
Each day, this chimeric government-run mass vaccination site made improvements in organization, communication, and safety precautions. Each day, they vaccinated thousands of people. At its peak, the site administered 12,000+ doses per day.
Vaccines became more widely available, and volunteer numbers dwindled. The once-long lines of cars became nonexistent. Contractors took over most of our work, and those of us who had volunteered were no longer needed. After two months of volunteering, thousands of sprayed vests later, my mission was complete. The site closed later that summer.
What I learned from the experience
1. In times of crisis, action trumps planning, and improvements must happen along the way.
77,000 people would have had their immunity delayed had the site spent my first two weeks there planning rather than operating. During the two months I worked there, the site administered over 300,000 vaccines. Sometimes the mission dictates speed over perfection.
2. I have no desire to work for a government agency.
Many of my frustrations with corporate life felt amplified in this environment. I witnessed leaders posturing while a small number of people bore the brunt of the real work. I saw money being squandered on bizarre things while simple things like team communication remained unsolved.
Even towards the end, I never really understood who made decisions or was supposed to communicate them. I showed up on one of my last days in a torrential spring thunderstorm, completely drenched while setting up for the shift, only to find out operations for the day were canceled.
What’s more bureaucratic and chaotic than the DMV? The DMV if it was run by three different government organizations in the middle of a global pandemic. In the crime-solving shows where the feds show up to a local investigation, the mystery gets solved but everyone is grumpy about it.
I appreciate public service, but it’s not my future career.
Despite minor frustrations, I’m grateful for the learning opportunity and ability to serve my community during the pandemic. I’m proud of the small part I played in vaccinating thousands of people a day. During the two months I spent volunteering, the mass vaccination site administered 315,658 doses.
The joy I felt when I visited two of my closest friends in the 15-minute waiting area was a small indication of what was to come. In the weeks after my friends and family became vaccinated, I was able to do many things I had missed so much.
We had dinner together, we danced, we hugged.
I am grateful for the scientists, the government agencies, the medical professionals—the people who made this possible.
I liked this idea of doing experiments during sabbatical. And it seems you enjoyed this, I can sense it as I read your enthusiasm toward serving the community. I think we all would like to be useful and volunteering for causes one believes in is one of the way to do that. For instance, I volunteer for animal causes here :)
In general, able to derive meaning from things other work is what most people need help with. Thanks for sharing and looking forward to more experiments.