COLUMBIA, SC (AP) – South Carolina will now allow medical students, retired nurses and other qualified professionals to administer the COVID-19 vaccine.
The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control says the temporary rule change is to ensure that the state has sufficient staff trained to administer the vaccines once the vaccine becomes more widely available.
The state is currently receiving about 64,000 doses from the federal government weekly, officials said. The limited number of doses available has frustrated Southern Carolinians as the state opened access to the vaccine for people aged 70 and over this week, leading to a race for vaccines. Some hospitals ran out of vaccination points for the elderly just hours after opening consultations.
Vaccination sites and the state health department were hit with thousands of calls as they called to vaccinate clogged phone lines and blocked sites on Wednesday.
The health department said on Thursday that its hotline, which received 5,000 calls the previous day, was “fully functional” after increasing the number of call center operators.
“However, we expect that there will still be some waiting time due to the continuous high volume of calls,” the agency said by email.
Hospitals administered the vast majority of the state’s vaccine doses in the first few weeks, in part because they have the infrastructure needed to maintain the ultra-cold temperatures needed to store the Pfizer vaccine. They pleaded with people to remain patient while the state embarks on more vaccine suppliers and obtains more shipments.
Francis Clark said he tried several times to schedule an appointment for his 81-year-old mother, who lives alone outside Florence and does not have access to the Internet. But the local hospital had no vacancies on Wednesday, Clark said, and the other vaccination sites are a long way away.
“My mom can’t drive to Charleston,” said Clark. “She is very old.”
And some health professionals, prioritized in the first phase of the vaccine plan, are still struggling to gain access. Christi Brady, a home pediatric nurse in Anderson, said she had contacted the state health department and the local hospital several times last week, before being told she could not get the vaccine because she was not affiliated with the hospital – a bad understood that it took several days to clarify.
When Brady got his own employer to request an interview with the vaccine, she had been exposed to the virus, she added.
“I felt there was enough time for government officials to implement something,” said Brady.
South Carolina has 924 sites enrolled in the federal vaccine administration program. Of these, 286 are activated, according to the health department. But only 29 of the 162 vaccination sites listed were accepting appointments on Thursday afternoon, according to an online map provided by the health agency.
On Wednesday night, the state said it administered 121,819 of the 313,100 doses it received, with another 119,105 appointments scheduled.
As in many other states, the winter wave in South Carolina has surpassed its previous peaks and overwhelmed the capacity of hospitals, but the extent of the number of victims of the virus has not been clear in recent days due to a lack of data.
The agency reported more than 4,800 new confirmed cases and 18 additional deaths on Thursday. But in the past four days, the agency’s case numbers have come with a caveat: DHEC says it is experiencing an “internal system problem” and will update the data on its panel to reflect the cases missing from these daily numbers, once resolved.
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Liu is a member of the Associated Press / Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a national nonprofit service program that puts journalists in local newsrooms to report on covert issues.