As Covid-19 testing sites move to vaccinations, health officials warn that balance is needed

As Covid-19 testing sites move to vaccinations, health officials warn that balance is needed

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Yet many health officials warn that balance is needed to ensure Covid-19 testing efforts continue, although the country is striving for more coronavirus vaccinations.

“It makes sense to convert some of the large-scale venues from testing to vaccination – just because we need to start scaling up vaccination, but I think there’s a balance,” Plescia said.

“We can not just switch everything to vaccinations,” he said. “We need to continue to have resources where people can be tested.”

Ball parks turn into massive vaccination sites

In Los Angeles, Dodger Stadium will switch to a Covid-19 vaccination site by the end of the week and, according to a statement from Mayor Eric Garcetti, LA, stopped hosting Covid-19 testing on Monday.

The announcement notes that the shift in resources “will temporarily reduce testing capacity” in the province of LA, but that it more than triples the number of daily vaccines available to residents.

“From early on in this pandemic, Dodger Stadium was the home base for our testing infrastructure, an important part of our effort to track the spread of COVID-19, to try to achieve breakthroughs and save lives,” Garcetti said Monday. .

“Vaccines are the surest way to defeat this virus and give a rate to recovery, so the city, county and our entire team are doing their best across the field to get Angelenos vaccinated as quickly, safely and effectively as possible.”

In New York City, a mega-vaccination site against Covid-19 will be set up at Citi Field Stadium later this month, according to an announcement from Mayor Bill de Blasio. The stadium was used earlier in the pandemic for Covid-19 testing.
“We chose this site in part because it was one of our test sites. It was a very popular test site,” said Dr. Ted Long, executive director of NYC Health + Hospitals Test and Trace Corps, which operates the vaccination center. , Said Tuesday during an information session. “So, we’ve tested there successfully, we’re going to be successful with the vaccine there.”
Yankee Stadium is expected to join Mets' Citi Field as a Covid-19 mega-website
Major League Baseball teams reached out to provincial and city health officials this week to present every MLB stadium in the country as a mass vaccination site, National Association of County and City Health Officials chief executive Lori Tremmel Freeman told Wednesday. CNN said.

“These stadiums are great areas that need to be used for bigger, mass vaccination efforts,” Freeman said, but she added that testing is still a priority.

“We have so many places in the country that are still experiencing high levels of disease transmission and revival, that we cannot afford to abandon the test at the moment,” she said. “We are too early in the vaccination process to do this because we still need to mitigate and manage the spread of the disease, even while we are vaccinating.”

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Stadiums are not the only facilities that are changing to vaccination sites or changing focus from testing to vaccine. Officials in Orange County, California, for example, announced Monday that the Disneyland resort in Anaheim will become a vaccination site and will be operational later this week.
In Philadelphia, a non-profit organization called “Philly Fighting Covid” set up a mass vaccination clinic at the Pennsylvania Convention Center last week. The group then announced Sunday that it was ‘the cancellation of tests until further notice to focus on vaccine surgeries.’
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More mass vaccination sites are likely to emerge after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced Tuesday that the federal government will help states set it up.

“If states want to set up mass vaccination sites, we are ready to help,” the U.S. surgeon said. Dr. Jerome Adams posted on Twitter on Tuesday.

‘We are not going to vaccinate our way out’ of the current boom

After taking a dive at the end of December, the test in the United States returned to the record high it reached before the holidays. According to the Covid Tracking Project, the seven-day average of new tests reached more than 1.9 million per day and has never been higher.

Covid-19 vaccinations and tests “must continue simultaneously” and are both currently “equally important,” Blaire Bryant, co-legislative director of health at the National Association of Counties, told CNN on Wednesday.
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“Provinces and local public health departments are going to find ways to continue testing and on a large scale,” Bryant said.

Reintroducing stadiums and other major vaccine sites would be a good thing to deliver vaccines, she said. “As far as testing is concerned, we know at the local level of public health that it is still very important and that we will not do one to sacrifice the other.”

Tests and vaccinations serve different purposes.

From a public health perspective, ‘short-term testing is needed to be able to respond quickly when cases increase and outbreaks occur or are interrupted, while vaccinations are a preventative solution to prevent cases and end the pandemic,’ said Dr. Sadiya Khan said. , assistant professor of preventive medicine in epidemiology at the North-West University Feinberg School of Medicine.

“In an ideal world, we would have enough resources to optimize the deployment of vaccines, as well as to continue with the necessary volumes,” she said. “I think there will always be a little give and take.”

Plescia, of the Association of Civil Servants and Territorial Health Officers, agrees that vaccination is the way out of the pandemic – but it is not the way out of record numbers and deaths the country is currently experiencing.

‘This issue is currently experiencing rapidly rising infection rates, and hospitals are being filled with more and more people dying. We are not going to get vaccinated from it, ‘Plescia said.

“What we are doing now with vaccination is not really going to come into its own for a few months. To be able to control what is going on now, we must continue to test, isolate and quarantine people, make people wear masks and maintain social distance. ‘

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