Day in the Life: Vaccination Site Volunteer

Who are you (apart from a vaccination site worker)?

I am a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania. My major is undecided, but I am passionate about Asian American race relations in the US. I am passionate about baseball and the outdoors. I am in the outdoors club and club baseball team at Penn. I try to seek outdoors as much as I can, and am involved in a lot of Asian American activist groups.

What made you decide to become a vaccination worker?

One of my friends posted about the vaccination site volunteer opportunity on Instagram and I thought it was cool so I signed up. The coronavirus pandemic is something so novel, something so unprecedented and a pretty big part of human history, something that happens every hundred years or so. You don’t get the chance to take part in something like this pretty often. I thought it would be impactful to take part in the mass vaccination of millions upon millions of people. There was a lot of coordination involved in such a hurried process. Everyone was working together in order to vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible. So being able to take part in something like this is something I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise. I wanted to capitalize on this opportunity.

What is your job like? What do you do? What are the duties/functions/responsibilities of your job?

There were different roles I could be a part of. It depended on the day, each day I was assigned a different role. I wasn’t the one actually giving out the shots, those were the nurses/nurse students. For the most part, I worked as a documentary which meant I was signing in patients, asking them basic medical questions, signing waivers, going through liabilities, making sure their appointments were set up, and setting up their second appointments. If I wasn’t a documenter, which is just logistical stuff on an iPad, I was directing traffic for the cars in the parking lot. I also served as a runner on occasion, which meant I would go back and forth to grab more vaccines, gloves, wipes, and bandaids for the nurses when they needed them. Basically just doing whatever the nurses needed me to do. So for the most part, I was either grabbing stuff for nurses, directing traffic, or working as a documenter.

What kinds of problems do you deal with?

The vaccination process was not entirely smooth. Some people had to wait quite some time, so there were some agitated individuals, especially those who didn’t qualify for a vaccine. They would usually wait an hour and a half to two hours to get the vaccine, only to find out they couldn’t get it because they didn’t qualify. I came across such individuals maybe once or twice a day. If I could deal with it, I did, but would usually direct them to my supervisor or to the LAFD who was on staff.

Were you able to maintain a volunteer-life balance? How?

I was on a gap year so I didn’t have much to do otherwise. During that period, I was just trying to find something to do, and was looking for employment/volunteer opportunities and I found the vaccination site. Volunteering served as something to do during my gap year.

What of value did you gain from your vaccination-site-worker experience?

I feel like working in public service/government is way harder than people think it is. The amount of work that goes into maintaining that vaccination site was unreal: The amount of people coming in, the amount of hours put in each day. I think there are some people who take this process for granted and don’t see the ‘nitty-gritty’ behind-the-scenes stuff so it’s easy for them to be like “Why is the government doing better?” “Why isn’t this vaccination site operating at peak efficiency?” “Why am I waiting over an hour?” But in reality this is something extremely difficult to put together and it takes a lot of work from a lot of individuals to do. I was able to experience this firsthand and value the effort that goes into these mass operations more highly.

What is your perspective on the future regarding COVID-19?

Honestly, I’d expected COVID-19 to be gone at this point. I think because of COVID-19, individuals are a lot more wary of and better prepared for potential events like this. I do hope as vaccinations continue to slowly increase, we can reach some sort of total immunity and can go back to normalcy with no restrictions. But this is only possible if enough people get vaccinated, so it is very important to make sure everyone who can get vaccinated does get vaccinated, and to advertise information about the vaccination so everyone can get it. I don’t think that we will ever revert to how things were like before COVID-19, in whole. For example, people in airplanes will probably still have to wear masks. Nonetheless, masks will still be a bigger part of our lives even if it doesn’t happen to be daily. But I hope if enough people get vaccinated, we can go back to a sense of normalcy.