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As Clark County’s COVID-19 vaccination efforts continue, staff and residents of Touchmark in Fairway Village recently received doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.
The assisted living facility in east Vancouver vaccinated 278 caregivers and residents on Sunday and Monday, and 150 more independent residents are expected to receive the vaccine in about two weeks.
Residents Bob and Myrna Turbush, both 92, said they were extremely happy to be vaccinated.
“We’ve been receiving vaccines for everything for at least 30 years, and regardless, we know the vaccines will protect us, and we want to receive that protection,” said Bob Turbush.
Since PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center administered Clark County’s first COVID-19 vaccination on December 16, the county has methodically reduced people’s immunizations.
Washington and Clark County remain in the early phase of the vaccine rollout, which includes workers at health care facilities, first responders, patients and staff at long-term care facilities, such as Touchmark.
As the county prepares for Phase 1B, which includes people 70 and older and anyone 50 or older living in a multigenerational household, it is making plans to speed up vaccinations.
Dr Steve Krager, deputy health officer for Clark County public health, said the county has requested state and federal resources for an incident management team that would help create a mass vaccination clinic as the county will reach phase 1B, which will include vaccinating about 50,000 people. to 75,000 people.
This clinic would be located on a site where a large number of people could be vaccinated every day.
The county could also use the team to help start a mobile vaccination clinic, where it could visit large workplaces, such as a food processing factory or a school to vaccinate workers at those sites.
Krager said public health could hear from federal resources as early as next week.
“If we get the resources, we would be able to support it pretty quickly,” Krager said of the mass clinic.
Speeding up the vaccination process
Public health data shows Clark County has received more than 27,000 doses of the vaccine, of which 6,000 are the second and final booster dose.
According to data from two weeks ago, Clark County’s vaccinations fell behind in the weeks following his first dose. Only 5,000 doses of the vaccine had been administered two weeks ago.
“We realized pretty quickly that it was going too slowly with the current systems,” Krager said. “The volume that will be needed for phase 1B, there is no way the current system will be able to immunize enough people.”
Part of the reason Clark County has outdated data for vaccinations administered is that the data is not easy to collect; Updating the numbers frequently would require relocating public health personnel who work to connect people to immunization opportunities.
“It’s important for us to know how much has been administered, but fewer people will be connected to a vaccination clinic if we do this,” Krager said.
The Washington Department of Health was due to unveil a state and county vaccination dashboard this week, but as of press time on Friday, the dashboard was not operational.
This means that the actual number of vaccines administered in Clark County is over 5,000 doses. Krager said local health providers have gotten much faster to immunize people and the process has gone more smoothly.
Ryan Erlewine, director of pharmacy and clinical support services at Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center, agreed with Krager’s assessment.
He said Legacy Salmon Creek administered 400 doses of the vaccine on Thursday. Erlewine did not have the daily figures on hand, but he said he was “99.9% sure” that Thursday was the hospital’s biggest daily flow so far.
Legacy Salmon Creek has administered approximately 2,000 doses of the vaccine, approximately half of which to non-hospital staff. Erlewine said about 55% of hospital staff received a first dose of the vaccine and 22% of those 55% received the second and last dose.
“We are really trying to do this in a fair way,” Erlewine said. “We want everyone to have access to the vaccine.”
Chastell Ely, spokesperson for the Vancouver clinic, said in an email that the Vancouver clinic had received 2,500 doses of the vaccine, of which 1,100 arrived this week. The Vancouver clinic inoculated approximately 1,450 clinic staff and other health care workers in the community.
PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center administered at least 5,000 doses of the vaccine, according to spokesperson Randy Querin. An unofficial tally of figures provided by PeaceHealth Southwest, Legacy Salmon Creek and Vancouver Clinic shows that at least 8,400 doses have been administered in the county so far.
Federal issues
At the moment, demand for vaccines for Phase 1A is already outstripping the capacity of local health care providers, according to a Clark County Public Health press release on Friday.
Public health receives several hundred requests a day for access to the vaccine and received 3,000 just last week.
For Public Health to create sites for large-scale vaccination opportunities, the vaccine supply will need to be much larger than it currently is. At this point, Clark County only has enough supply to make a fraction of the population eligible for Phase 1B, Krager said.
Federal snafus tormented coronavirus testing at the start of the pandemic, and similar issues are emerging with the vaccine’s rollout in the United States. Oregon Governor Kate Brown announced on Friday that Oregon was canceling its expanded immunization plan because the federal government was not going to provide additional vaccines to the state.
Oregon had plans to extend vaccination to people 65 and older, a recent recommendation from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Without additional supply, the state can no longer meet this demand.
Vaccines move from the federal level to the state level to local facilities such as hospitals.
“The reliability of the federal government’s dose projections has not been great,” Krager said. “It makes planning a bit more difficult. These are challenges we face. “
Nonetheless, Krager is optimistic that things will continue to improve and that Clark County will soon increase its vaccinations, as long as the supply is there. He said the county has contingency plans to have large-scale vaccinations, even though it is not receiving additional resources from the state and federal government.
“I understand the desire of people to be vaccinated, and we are working as hard as possible to make it a reality,” Krager said. “We have supply and logistics issues which are difficult, but we are working to overcome them.”
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