While the COVID-19 vaccination effort continues in Clark County, Touchmark staff and residents at Fairway Village recently received doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.
The relief facility in East Vancouver vaccinated 278 caregivers and residents on Sunday and Monday, with another 150 independent residents receiving the vaccine within about two weeks.
Residents Bob and Myrna Turbush, both 92, said they were very happy to be vaccinated.
“We’ve been getting vaccinations for everything for at least the last thirty years, and no matter what it is, we know that vaccines will protect us, and we want to receive that protection,” Bob Turbush said.
Since PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center administered Clark County’s first COVID-19 vaccination on Dec. 16, the province has been methodically hacking into vaccinating people.
Washington and Clark County remain in the first phase of vaccine rollouts, which include health care workers, first responders and patients and staff at long-term care facilities, such as Touchmark.
As the province prepares for Phase 1B, which is preparing people aged 70 and over and anyone aged 50 or older living in a multigenerational household, it is preparing plans to speed up vaccinations.
Dr Steve Krager, Clark County Public Health’s deputy health officer, said the county has asked state and federal resources for an incident management team that will help create a mass vaccine clinic as the province reaches Phase 1B, which will include the vaccination of an estimated 50,000. up to 75,000 people.
The clinic would be in a place where a large number of people could be vaccinated every day.
The province can also use the team to start a mobile vaccination clinic, where they can visit large workplaces, such as a food processing plant or school, to vaccinate workers at those places.
Krager said Public Health could already hear about federal resources next week.
“If we get the resources, we’ll be able to get it up pretty quickly,” Krager said of the mass clinic.
Vaccination process accelerates
Public health data shows that Clark County has received more than 27,000 doses of vaccination, of which 6,000 are the second and final booster dose.
According to data that is two weeks old, vaccinations in Clark County have slowed in the weeks after the first dose was administered. Only 5,000 doses of the vaccine have been administered since two weeks ago.
“We realized pretty quickly that things were going too slowly with the current systems,” Krager said. “The volume needed for Phase 1B, the current system will in no way be able to vaccinate enough people.”
Part of the reason Clark County has outdated data for administered vaccinations is because the data cannot be easily collected; to update the numbers regularly, public health professionals working to link people to vaccinations will need to be relocated.
“It’s important for us to know how much has been administered, but fewer people will be linked to a vaccine clinic if we do,” Krager said.
The Washington Department of Health is expected to launch an information panel for state and county vaccinations this week, but as of press time Friday, the dashboard was not up and running.
This means that the actual number of Clark County vaccines administered is higher than 5,000 doses. Krager said local health care providers have become much faster at vaccinating people and that the process is smoother.
Ryan Erlewine, director of pharmacies and clinical support services at Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center, agrees 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 percent sure he was the hospital’s largest daily throughput so far on Thursday.
Legacy Salmon Creek administered approximately 2,000 doses of the vaccine, approximately half of which were administered to non-hospital staff. Erlewine said about 55 percent of hospital staff received a first dose of the vaccine and 22 percent of the 55 percent received the second and final dose.
“We’re really trying to do it in a fair way,” Erlewine said. “We want everyone to have access to the vaccine.”
Chastell Ely, a spokeswoman for Vancouver Clinic, said in an email that Vancouver Clinic had received 2,500 doses, and 1,100 people had arrived this week. Vancouver Clinic vaccinated approximately 1,450 clinic staff and other health care professionals in the community.
According to spokeswoman Randy Querin, PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center administered at least 5,000 doses of the vaccine. An unofficial count of the numbers provided by PeaceHealth Southwest, Legacy Salmon Creek and Vancouver Clinic shows that at least 8,400 doses have been administered in the country so far.
Federal issues
Currently, the demand for Phase 1A vaccine is already exceeding the capacity of local healthcare providers, according to a Clark County Public Health news release Friday.
Public Health receives several hundred requests a day for access to the vaccine and has received 3,000 in the past week alone.
To create public health sites for large-scale vaccination opportunities, the vaccine supply must be much larger than now. At this point, Clark County has just enough inventory to do a fraction of the qualifying population for Phase 1B, Krager said.
Federal snaffus plagued coronavirus tests early in the pandemic, and similar problems appeared with the deployment of the U.S. vaccine. On Friday, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced that Oregon would return its extensive vaccination plan because the federal government would not provide additional vaccine supplies to the state.
Oregon is planning to expand vaccinations to people 65 and older, a recent recommendation from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Without extra supply, the state can no longer supply the demand.
Vaccinations find their way from the federal level to the state level to local facilities such as hospitals.
“The reliability of federal government dose predictions was not great,” Krager said. ‘It makes planning a little harder. These are challenges we face. ”
Krager is nonetheless optimistic that things will continue to iron out and that Clark County will soon increase its vaccinations as long as stocks are there. He said the province has emergency plans to have large-scale vaccinations, even if it does not receive extra resources from the state and federal government.
“I understand people’s desire to be vaccinated, and we’re working as hard as we can to make it happen,” Krager said. “We have challenges that are supply and logistics, but we are overcoming them.”