[ad_1]
Health officials announced Thursday that the age required to receive a COVID-19 vaccine is dropping significantly, but in Summit County that age is lower than anywhere else in the state – at least temporarily.
Governor Spencer Cox announced Thursday morning that all Utahns 50 years of age or older, and some others who have certain medical conditions, would be eligible to receive a COVID-19 vaccine starting March 8.
“This is the biggest group we’ve ever added,” Cox said during a press briefing. “And we have more and more vaccines in the state every week – which is why we feel comfortable doing it.”
Half an hour later, Summit County announced that it was inviting all Summit County residents aged 40 and over to make an appointment for the vaccine.
The discrepancy is due to how the county collected age data in its pre-registration system, Health Director Rich Bullough said.
In January, the county asked residents to register with an online database the county would use to notify residents when they could register for vaccinations. The form did not require a birthday, but asked users to divide into age categories, two of which were 40 to 54 and 55 to 64. Threshold of 50 years, these two age groups included 6,300 people registered.
Rather than removing the data or rejecting people aged 50 to 54, Bullough said he decided to open up eligibility to people aged 40 to 49 as well.
“Late last night I made the decision, rather than erring in favor of vaccinating fewer people, I made the decision to vaccinate more people,” Bullough said in an interview Thursday.
Going forward, the county will rank people who register on the county site as those 50 and over, prioritizing the oldest group by state mandate.
The county has emailed invitations to 6,300 pre-registered people aged 40 or older, Bullough said, and the county estimated it would take four to six weeks for new registrants to make an appointment.
Even for those who have pre-registered, it can take weeks from when someone is eligible to make an appointment until the date of that appointment.
During Thursday morning’s briefing, Cox told Utahns to wait to make an appointment until Monday to avoid overloading websites and call centers that are easing the unprecedented vaccination effort.
Within an hour of the announcement, the Summit County Health Department website had gone down. It was not restored until early Thursday evening.
Bullough acknowledged the county could see an influx of people 40 and over from across the state, but said he expected statewide eligibility to be expanded in a matter of weeks.
Cox said he plans to open vaccine eligibility to all adults in Utah next month, although he warned the timeline was upbeat and “assuming everything goes according to plan.”
“We anticipate and hope that by April, early April, we will be able to open eligibility to all adults in the state of Utah. This is what we are aiming for, ”he said.
Cox’s announcement follows the state’s receipt of its first batch of vaccines manufactured by Johnson & Johnson – 23,000 doses arrived Wednesday, the governor said – and the announcement that healthcare partners, including Intermountain Healthcare, would create mass vaccination sites, including one at Park City Hospital.
Park City Hospital CEO Lori Weston said the hospital received 1,200 doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine on Wednesday and clinicians are not reserving this vaccine for any particular patient or use.
“The effectiveness is about the same, the side effects are the same, it just increases the amount of vaccine coming into our county,” Weston said. “… There is no one brand better than the others. They are all effective.
The vaccine made by Johnson & Johnson only requires a single dose and officials said it was as effective in preventing serious illness and death as vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer.
Weston said Thursday was the first day of the hospital’s high-throughput vaccination clinic, one of 16 sites Intermountain Healthcare plans to use to rapidly distribute the vaccine. She said the operation went well and they delivered 700 vaccines on Thursday.
She said it was essential for people to maintain an appointment for the vaccine if they take one to avoid wasting doses and canceling an appointment if they know they won’t be able to. to do.
“They really need to recognize that a date is a dose,” she says. “And so when you cancel or don’t show up, you leave a dose unused and it’s wasted, so we all have to scramble to figure out who we can give doses to at the end of it.
The hospital plans to run the clinic daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and Weston has said it could immunize more than 1,000 people a day. The drive-thru clinic near Summit County at Utah Film Studios recently doubled its capacity and Bullough said it could administer 600 shots a day.
Cox also announced that Utahns could search for a vaccine anywhere in the state, but warned they must return to that site to receive the second dose. Weston said Intermountain Healthcare’s online portal would allow eligible users to choose the site that’s right for them.
Officials anticipated a massive increase in the number of doses coming to Utah by the end of the month, and that the distribution network will soon expand to include partnerships with private entities like pharmacies at Walmart and Smith. .
Weston said 15-20 staff were needed to run the hospital’s vaccination clinic and the hospital was not cutting back on its other health services, which once again increased the workload for clinicians.
But she said morale among hospital workers was high as vaccine collection ramped up.
“It’s really good, especially looking at the vaccines given,” she says. “It’s a sign of hope and they feel like we’re going to get this pandemic under control and be able to reach some kind of new normal in the near future.”
To register for a vaccine, visit intermountainhealthcare.org, Summitcountyhealth.org/vaccine or call 435-333-0050.
[ad_2]
Source link