After the announcement by Olivier Véran, Thursday, November 25, of the opening of the third booster dose of the Covid-19 vaccine to all adults, the traffic was “multiplied by 20” on the appointment booking platform -you Maiia, announces her communications director. Matthieu Bécamel speaks of a peak at “250 appointments per second” this Thursday.
franceinfo: Did these announcements have an effect on your platform?
Matthieu Bécamel: As with every speech now, we systematically see peaks in attendance on the platform. This was the case yesterday since at the end of the day, we had a traffic multiplied by 20 on the site linked to this speech. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of connections with, sometimes, at the height of the peak, 250 appointments per second by the French. It’s completely huge, and it also corresponds somewhat to what we had on July 12, during the speech where we opened the vaccination to all French people.
With Maiia, we have, moreover, almost 200,000 accounts that are created every month, which is to tell you the acceleration that we are experiencing with this pandemic.
Matthieu Becamelto franceinfo
There are, moreover, always some requests for first injections, but today, they are really in the minority. We are on less than 10% of first doses. It’s really marginal. Today, we are mainly on the reminders and the delayers of the second dose.
Did you strengthen the servers and the upstream teams to avoid blockages?
The site had a few slowdowns yesterday, but they did not block reservations at all. We have a chance, it is that our servers are in France, managed by Cegedim, which is the group which developed Maiia. We therefore have a flexibility that allows us to absorb these charges. And we had anticipated, as always, moreover. This is why it went well and why all the French who went to Maiia managed to take the available slots. And then, the French expect this kind of announcements. There were almost three times, four times already the day before the speech. This is to tell you that it is customary, we are experiencing something that is almost classic, I would say. This will continue today and in the coming days, since we have nearly 18 million French people who will be affected on December 15 by this booster dose. Luckily for them, they have until February before the pass expires. But we are going to have this influx of 18 million French patients who will try to make an appointment.
There are regions where we cannot yet find slots, will this unlock?
Yes, and for several reasons. The first is that the centers had started to close one after the other, and in fact, 300 centers are going to reopen again. These centers must come back afloat in order to be able to offer slots on all online reservation platforms. These slots will arrive and will be made available. There is a second phenomenon which is also interesting, which is that vaccination in the city is becoming more democratic since today, pharmacists will be able to order as many doses as they wish.
You will be able to get vaccinated in a pharmacy, at your general practitioner, but also at nurses, physiotherapists, midwives.
Matthieu Becamelto franceinfo
What we actually observe is that overall, in the coming weeks, the slots are already all reserved. We still have them in pharmacies from mid-December. But we are hopeful that with the reopening of the centers, we will have slots that come back and open before that date.