Virginia is making changes to the pre-registration process for people eligible for the coronavirus vaccine. Shifts in the D.C. process are also on the horizon next month, officials say.

Up until now, Virginia residents were supposed to fill out a form with their local health department in order to be notified when vaccine appointments became available. Filling out the form put them on their locality’s waiting list. From there, people were notified in order about when appointments were available.

But that’s going to change. Starting on Tuesday, Virginia will roll out a statewide registration portal. Existing local registration systems will close down Friday at 5 p.m. in preparation for the new state version.

In an announcement, the Virginia Department of Health said the state expects the new system “will provide a unified and comprehensive process for people in Virginia to pre-register for the COVID-19 vaccine.”

Officials say people who have already registered through their local health department will not need to register separately in the new system. The information from local waiting lists will be automatically pulled into the new statewide database, and officials say people won’t lose their places in line.

The Virginia statewide pre-registration news comes after a messy opening up of a new trove of vaccine appointments, at CVS locations across the state. CVS pharmacies opened up to give 26,000 doses out this week as part of a federal partnership program — a significant number of shots, representing an added 20% of the state’s weekly total.

But CVS and Virginia officials were unable to make one key part of the CVS rollout work. CVS couldn’t make its online registration system compatible with local health districts’ waiting lists. And a proposed workaround — to allow local health officials onto the CVS system early, to fill CVS spots with people on existing local waiting lists — didn’t work.

“What they agreed to do was that they would go ahead and make the appointment scheduler available starting today and then that would hopefully give our health department folks a bit of a heads up – a head start to get folks off of our registration list enrolled in appointments,” Virginia vaccine coordinator Dr. Danny Avula said in a press conference this week. “Unfortunately they were not able to do that in a way that limited access. What that led to was that anybody who was on the internet trying to get an appointment through CVS could go in and make an appointment.”

Avula said CVS will cross-check the people who snapped up the initial CVS appointments to make sure they are over the age of 65 (moving forward, CVS will only vaccinate people eligible for the vaccine in Virginia — certain essential workers and people who are 65 or older). And while Avula hoped the CVS system could be integrated with the public health waiting list system, he told reporters this week that the state and CVS “hit a dead end” trying to make that happen. Instead, people over 65 who want to try to get a vaccine through the CVS partnership in Virginia will have to log to try to snag an appointment when new ones open up every week.

Next month, D.C. will also allow people to sign up to be notified when a vaccine is available to them. D.C. officials stress that the new pre-registration process is not a waitlist.

“A waitlist would be that individuals would come onto the system and essentially get in line for a vaccine,” DC Health Director Dr. LaQandra Nesbitt told reporters at a recent press conference. “Our process will continue to apply an equity lens…a combination of criteria, including their qualifying eligibility phase, their geography or zip code in which they live based on that zip code’s priority in the city and when they register will be used to determine when they are eligible for a vaccine appointment.”

The changes in the D.C. system are in response to intense demand for appointments for shots — new slots typically fill up minutes after being released at the end of the week — and concerns that the District’s approach is not accessible or equitable. Nesbitt said the new pre-registration system will help include people who can’t log onto the internet or wait on hold for the call center at 9 a.m. every Thursday or Friday to try to snag an appointment.

“This newer system, when it goes live in March, will be able to be flexible and accessible for people 24 hours a day online,” she said. “And then the call center will also have hours that tend to go outside of a traditional eight-hour workday.”

Communities of color, especially Black Washingtonians, have borne the brunt of the coronavirus pandemic in the District. And Some Black residents have expressed concern over a lack of access to the vaccine. The District has made other changes in its vaccine rollout process with an eye to equity, setting aside health department appointment slots for zip codes lagging behind in sign-ups and reserving others for appointments made through the call center.