SALT LAKE CITY – More than 20,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine were administered by health officials in Utah on Tuesday – just 20% of the amount of vaccine sent to the state.
“A lot goes into getting a vaccine,” said Health Department spokeswoman Jenny Johnson. “It’s not surprising to us that people see a number sent to Utah and they think it means we have to get 100,000 people vaccinated as soon as we get the vaccine. And that’s just not how it works.”
The numbers released on Tuesday showed that Pfizer and Moderna have jointly sent 102,025 doses of the vaccine to Utah since its inception, and 20,417 of those doses are to health workers and others in Phase 1 of the distribution plan of the state recorded, given.
“People just need to know there’s a delay in the time from shipping to the time it goes into someone’s arm,” Johnson said. “But we give vaccines to people.”
Johnson said that when the state reports the number of “dispatched” doses, it does not necessarily mean they are still in the state. The delay between doses sent to doses administered is up to seven days, she said. There is also a 24-hour window to report that the vaccine has been administered, which contributes to the delay in the numbers reported.
People just need to know there is a delay in the time from shipment to the time it goes in someone’s arm.
–Jenny Johnson, Utah Department of Health
Hospitals are instructed not to administer the vaccine to all staff members at once, “because if they have some side effects that they want to make at home and want to rest, you do not have staff who cannot work.” Johnson also stressed that the vaccine is not the only thing hospitals have to deal with.
“These are the same places that handled the attack on COVID-19 patients,” she said. “And they’re tired.”
Yet 20% of the vaccine administered is low compared to what other states reported in a recent New York Times article. It showed that neighboring Colorado had already administered more than 75% of their vaccine and Wyoming had administered nearly 50%.
“I can’t talk about why some states administered more vaccine than Utah,” Johnson said.
But Utah is doing better than the national average. The CDC reported on Tuesday that 2.1 million doses had been administered out of 11.4 million distributed across the country. This amounts to about 18%.
Johnson said the recent COVID-19 bill the president signed this week would help with the distribution of vaccines.
“We need the Cares Act funding to continue our response efforts,” she said.
Local health departments in the state have also filled out part of the vaccine to prepare for clinics that Johnson says will begin this week. Johnson expects that the clinics, along with the distribution currently taking place to long-term care facilities, will help reduce the gap between transmitted and administered vaccines.