CHESTER Earlier this year, a large team of residents from Chester — all volunteers and mostly from St. Lawrence the Martyr Parish here — worked on their computers past midnight to secure up to 2,000 people coveted time slots for COVID-19 vaccines, giving them all hope in saving their own lives and helping to slow the global pandemic.
A team of 50 people from Chester, called the COVID-19 Angels, repurposed a telephone hotline at St. Lawrence and developed a social media presence to field requests it received each day for vaccine appointments. Volunteers also secured rides to appointments for many of the people who submitted requests, mostly the elderly and the sick. Started in February, COVID-19 Angels soon helped St. Matthew the Apostle Parish in Randolph set up its own team, said Heather McCarthy, a St. Lawrence parishioner and a team administrator, who originated the idea.
Early in the pandemic, Jill Littmann, 55, a pre-k aide in Dickerson Elementary School in Chester and a St. Lawrence parishioner, was “getting frustrated trying to get an appointment. What the COVID-19 Angels did was huge — and so fast,” said Littmann, who got her shots a few weeks after the appointment was booked. “It gave me protection and allowed me to be supportive of my co-workers because we had in-person classes,” she said.
Closed in May, COVID-19 Angels — considered a Lenten project by the volunteers from St. Lawrence — received accolades from public officials. Mayor Janet G. Hoven of Chester Borough presented the team with a proclamation. Also, N.J. State Assemblywoman Aura R. Dunn (R) of the local 25th Legislative District, gave St. Lawrence a citation from the Assembly for their all-out efforts to book appointments.
“[St. Lawrence] is commended for bringing honor and pride to the community for its humanitarian support during the COVID-19 pandemic by facilitating their hotline for the Chester COVID volunteers to secure vaccine appointments for the public,” Dunn states in the citation.
The process of scheduling a vaccine appointment started when a person called the team’s telephone hotline or posted a request on its Facebook page. Soon after, one of three “administrators” — McCarthy, Simone Campbell, or Heather Hearon — listened to or read the request and logged it onto a computer spreadsheet, said McCarthy, who teaches sixth-to-eighth-grade language arts and seventh-grade theology at St. Vincent Martyr School in Madison.
Later on, the administrators sent batches of names to anyone of more than 40 “bookers” each night, usually before midnight. Bookers went to the websites of the mega-centers that were offering the vaccines and tried to schedule appointments when registration opened at midnight. They received names and cell phone numbers of the people making the requests, so they could add them to their contacts in their cell phones. Once registration opened, bookers had 15 seconds per person to schedule an appointment, using the phone’s autofill function, which fills in all the person’s information with one keystroke — all by putting in their contacts, McCarthy said.
“There were so many moving parts. It was like lightening in a bottle. We all worked together and got so much accomplished,” said McCarthy, noting that team members often slept in shifts at night so they could grab as many time slots, usually made available through prior cancellations. “The recognition that we received could show other people that they don’t need any particular skills to help others, only the desire. There is nothing that can fill you up like serving others,” she said.
Most of the appointments were for the Pfizer vaccine. Early on, they were available at mega-centers in places such as the Rockaway Townsquare Mall, Meadowlands Racetrack in East Rutherford, and St. Joseph Regional Medical Center in Paterson. Later, appointments opened up at local pharmacies, said Shannon Rossi, a member of St. Lawrence’s faith-formation and youth-ministry teams, who served as a booker with COVID-19 Angels and the trainer for both Chester and Randolph teams.
At first, the Chester team was able to book appointments in two or three days. But the volunteers got so skilled at it that they were able to cut that down to same day or next day. Of the 30 people, who called on average each day, some of them phoned in from as far away as Cumberland and Ocean counties. So bookers found time slots at locations closer to their homes, Rossi said.
After making an appointment, bookers called the person making the request at 9 a.m. that morning to let him or her know and then asked the person if he or she needed a ride. Sometimes, a family member transported them. But in other instances, the booker made arrangements with one of a large pool of drivers from St. Lawrence and beyond. In some instances, volunteers drove the person’s family members other places — like children to soccer practice — so that he or she could make the appointment, Rossi said.
“It’s difficult to get accolades and attention. I say ‘thank you,’ ” Rossi said about the honors from public officials. “It’s daunting for an 85-year-old person to make an appointment when he or she might not know how to use a computer or even have a cell phone. Many of them were sick. We [volunteers] gladly woke up every 45 minutes at night and did it with joy in our hearts. What we did saved lives,” she said.
As word of the COVID-19 Angels’ work spread far and wide, Rossi set up a videoconferencing session for people in Chester and Randolph to teach them the system and how to book appointments quickly — training that was made available on YouTube, she said.
The idea for COVID-19 Angels was born when McCarthy noticed a long line for a vaccine at a local spot and thought about a way to get people appointments — and more quickly. She enlisted the help of Campbell, Hearon, and other women in Chester to set up the system, which included social media. David Galdi, in formation for the permanent diaconate at St. Lawrence, temporarily switched over the parish’s helpline to the team’s hotline and set up a hotline for St. Matthew’s. Father Nicholas Bozza, St. Lawrence’s pastor, and Deacon Greg Szpunar, also of St. Lawrence, researched the ethics of taking the vaccines from the viewpoint of the Church, Rossi said.
Father Bozza expressed his “gratitude to everyone who handled this important project.
“All of these people saw a need and acted on that need. They helped a lot of people in Chester and well beyond,” Father Bozza said.