“Our couriers travel many, many miles. Our doctors, our staff drive miles,” said Susan Jarvis, president and CEO of Sanford Health in northern Minnesota.
In Bemidji, Minnesota, the final phase of the vaccine begins in a number of communities when it is unloaded from the ultra-cold store and packaged in refrigerated containers such as those you can see at a cooking place – except that there are important data loggers by is.
“They are so scrutinized as to their storage requirements for freezer temperature, refrigeration temperature and it’s only five days good if we take it out of the ultra-cold freezer,” said Matt Webb, director of pharmacy at Sanford, Health .
“The data logger is therefore a device that monitors the temperature during transport until they reach a refrigerator in their hospital.”
Once the doses are safe and ready to go, the next step is simply to get in a minibus – and drive. A vaccine delivery trip that CNN followed began from Bemidji and ended in a city of 9,000 people called Thief River Falls, just over 90 kilometers northwest.
“I do not think there was any concern about it,” said Carla Szklarski, a prevention of infections (among a number of other posts), at Sanford Health Thief River Falls. “It was rather the logistics of how it would happen.”
President Biden has said he expects the U.S. to vaccinate 1.5 million people a day “within the next three weeks or so”, but in many parts of rural America the barrier to being part of the vaccinations is simply coming up. distance down.
“It’s nice to be offended for once,” Webb said. “Making sure we can vaccinate people as close to home as possible is really important.”
Sanford has only five sites capable of meeting the ultra-cold storage requirements for the Pfizer / BioNtech vaccine, with a coverage of more than 200 000 square mile across North Dakota, South Dakota and parts of Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota.
The state of Minnesota has allocated that the vaccine will only be distributed to hospitals as it has the necessary storage capacity.
Sanford’s couriers pick up from those five places and depart.
“It was really a process we could utilize and expand so we could use it for vaccination and distribution,” Jarvis said.
But that does not mean that there are no roadblocks.
In Bagley, a town about 30 km from Bemidji, some of Sanford’s laboratory results had to be delayed due to the conditions on the winter roads. “The courier routes were canceled because of snowstorms,” said Stephanie McKnight, administrator of hospitals and clinics in Bagley.
“I can not think of a time when we did not have what we needed at all. There were times when we cut it very close.”
“Distance in northern Minnesota obviously plays a big role in the ability to get vaccines efficiently. It can also hinder someone’s decision to take a vaccine if we make it difficult to receive it,” said Alyssa Carlson , pharmacy manager at the Bemidji and Bagley medical, said. centers.
Sanford Health told CNN that in late January in the Northern Minnesota region, it was able to get two doses of the vaccine to more than 1,000 staff members as part of Group 1a and at least the first dose for hundreds of 65 and older patients. as part of the next distribution phase. The system says it is now sharing storage resources with the local department of public health in Bemidji as part of the shooting into the arms as quickly as possible.
“Everyone knows everyone”
“In a rural community, we tend to know who our patients are before they become patients,” said Dr. Colleen Swank, vice president of clinics for Sanford Health in northern Minnesota, said.
“It is not the 75-year-old man who is in bed with Covid, but Mr. Smith, my father’s neighbor. ‘
Thief River Falls, about 70 km from the Canadian border, initially thought he had avoided the pandemic – until he found that it was not. Healthcare professionals told CNN that at one point most of their patients were Covid-19 patients in a city where “everyone knows.”
“I went home and cried the first night that I had to tell someone that they could not come to visit,” Szklarski said.
“We always thought no one else died alone. The family is a big part of their care, their emotional and physical well-being, and then it was the hardest thing not to have it here.”
She described these patients as a member of her own family, which made the pain of the pandemic much more difficult, ‘to go to virtually a family member and tell them: I’m sorry you can not come in to you mother. ‘
Szklarski, like so many others, sees this vaccine as a source of hope, especially because of her dual families, the one that includes her family members – and the one that includes her patients.
‘I think this is something we have taken for granted in the past, you know? To enter the hospital and visit our loved ones. And we can no longer do that, ‘she said.