Girl with unlucky phone number flooded with callers seeking vaccine, Missouri mom says

An 8-year-old Missouri girl has been getting dozens of calls a day from people trying to get a COVID-19 vaccine, her mom says.

Why? Because of her phone number.

Sophia Garcia is a third-grader in Sullivan who loves school and soccer.

She has a cellphone meant for keeping in touch with family — her mom and grandparents are among the only saved contacts — but two weeks ago, she started getting calls from strangers.

A lot of them.

“We can’t really figure out why or what had changed, but all of a sudden she was getting 30, 40, sometimes 50 calls a day,” Emily Lewis, Sophia’s mom, told McClatchy News. “And it was all hours of the day and night.”

Sophia doesn’t answer unless she knows the caller, so she took the phone to her mom when the calls and voicemails started rolling in, Lewis told McClatchy.

“One after one they were talking about making an appointment for a COVID vaccine,” Lewis said. “The first one we thought that was kind of strange, then two and three and four and more asking about a COVID vaccine, we started doing research ...”

She noticed the calls were coming from Arizona phone numbers — Lewis used to live in Arizona and Sophia’s phone has an Arizona area code.

After a little digging, she discovered Sophia’s phone number is one digit different than a phone number listed for the Arizona Department of Health Services.

The agency included the number in a news release about scheduling a second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. It was also recommended to a Twitter user whose loved one was having a tough time getting a vaccine appointment scheduled.

Lewis said she suspects people are misdialing Sophia while trying to reach the health agency.

“She was probably 5 years old when she recorded her voicemail,” Lewis told McClatchy. “You could clearly tell it was a little kid. But people weren’t listening to the voicemail and were leaving messages.”

She said some callers left kind voicemails while others seemed frustrated: something Lewis understands. She said she had to try several times to get through to the health department, which ultimately told her there was nothing it could do since the issue wasn’t a typo and the phone number was listed correctly online.

McClatchy has contacted the health department for comment.

One voicemail, however, stood out to Sophia.

It was from a 75-year-old woman who explained she’d “been trying and trying and trying to get an appointment and nobody answers,” Lewis said. The woman was also running into roadblocks online. “She ended the phone message and just said, ‘Please help me,’” Lewis added.

That’s when Sophia decided she wanted to do something to help other callers. Sophia’s mom asked if she wanted to change her phone number, but Sophia refused because the number was easy for her to remember.

Instead, she decided to change her voicemail message.

It now states: “Hi, you’ve reached Sophia’s iPhone. If you’re looking for a COVID vaccine, their number is 602-542-1000. I’ll say it again: 602-542-1000.”

And the new message appears to have helped — the calls have dropped. Sophia is now only receiving a couple a day.

Lewis said Sophia hid in a room and recorded the message on her own. After listening to it, she asked Sophia why she repeated the number. Sophia told her mom she wanted to give callers time to grab a paper and pen.

“She really likes to help people,” Lewis said, adding that Sophia recently won an empathy award at school.

Sullivan is roughly 70 miles southwest of St. Louis.