As Clark County’s COVID-19 vaccination efforts continue, the team and Touchmark residents in Fairway Village recently received doses of a COVID-19 vaccine.
The assisted living facility in eastern Vancouver inoculated 278 caregivers and residents on Sunday and Monday, with another 150 independent residents scheduled to receive the vaccine in about two weeks.
Residents Bob and Myrna Turbush, both 92, said they are extremely happy to have been vaccinated.
“We have been getting vaccines for everything for at least 30 years and, no matter what, we know that vaccines will protect us and we want to receive that protection,” said Bob Turbush.
Since PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center administered Clark County’s first COVID-19 vaccination on December 16, the county has been methodically reducing vaccinations for people.
Washington and Clark County remain in the first phase of vaccine implementation, which includes workers in healthcare settings, first responders and patients and employees in long-term care facilities like Touchmark.
As the county prepares for Phase 1B, which includes people aged 70 and over and anyone aged 50 and over who lives in a multi-generational home, it is preparing plans to speed up vaccinations.
Dr. Steve Krager, deputy health officer for Clark County Public Health, said the county had requested state and federal resources for an incident management team that would help create a mass vaccination clinic when the county reaches Phase 1B, which will include vaccinating about 50,000 to 75,000 people.
This clinic would be in a place where a large number of people could be vaccinated every day.
The county can also use the team to help start a mobile vaccine clinic, where it can visit large workplaces, such as a food processing plant or school, to vaccinate workers in those locations.
Krager said Public Health could hear about federal funds as early as next week.
“If we get the resources, we will be able to resist very quickly,” said Krager of the mass clinic.
Speeding up vaccination process
Public health data shows that Clark County received more than 27,000 doses of vaccine, 6,000 of which are the second and last booster dose.
According to two-week data, vaccinations in Clark County took a few weeks after the first dose was administered. Only 5,000 doses of the vaccine were administered two weeks ago.
“We quickly realized that it was going very slowly with today’s systems,” said Krager. “With the volume that will be required for Phase 1B, there is no way the current system will vaccinate enough people.”
Part of the reason that Clark County has outdated data for administered vaccinations is because the data is not easily collected; Updating the numbers frequently would require changing the public health team that is working to connect people to vaccination opportunities.
“It is important for us to know how much has been administered, but fewer people will be connected to a vaccine clinic if we do that,” said Krager.
The Washington Department of Health was expected to reveal a state and municipal vaccination panel this week, but as of this Friday, the panel was not working.
This means that the actual number of vaccinations administered in Clark County is more than 5,000 doses. Krager said that local health care providers have become much faster at vaccinating people and that the process is working more smoothly.
Ryan Erlewine, director of pharmacy and clinical support services at the Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center, agreed with Krager’s assessment.
He said Legacy Salmon Creek administered 400 doses of the vaccine on Thursday. Erlewine did not have the daily numbers at hand, but said he was “99.9 percent sure” that Thursday was the hospital’s biggest daily flow to date.
Legacy Salmon Creek administered about 2,000 doses of the vaccine, about half of which were for people who are not hospital employees. Erlewine said that about 55% of hospital staff received the first dose of the vaccine and 22% of those 55% received the second and last dose.
“We are really trying to do this fairly,” said Erlewine. “We want everyone to have access to the vaccine.”
Chastell Ely, a spokesman for the Vancouver Clinic, said in an email that the Vancouver Clinic received 2,500 doses of the vaccine, with 1,100 arriving this week. The Vancouver Clinic inoculated about 1,450 clinic staff and other health professionals in the community.
PeaceHealth Southwest Medical Center administered at least 5,000 doses of the vaccine, according to spokesman Randy Querin. 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 county so far.
Federal issues
At the moment, demand for the Phase 1A vaccine already exceeds the capacity of local healthcare providers, according to a press release from Clark County Public Health on Friday.
Public Health is receiving several hundred requests a day for access to the vaccine and has received 3,000 in the past week alone.
For Public Health to create sites for large-scale vaccination opportunities, the vaccine supply will need to be much greater than it is now. At this point, Clark County has only enough supply to make a fraction of the population qualified for Phase 1B, said Krager.
Federal confusion affected coronavirus testing early in the pandemic, and similar issues are emerging with the vaccine’s launch in the United States. On Friday, Oregon Governor Kate Brown announced that Oregon is reversing its expanded vaccination plan because the federal government will not give the state an extra supply of vaccine.
Oregon had planned to expand vaccination to people aged 65 and over, a recent recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States. Without extra supply, the state is no longer able to meet this demand.
Vaccines go from the federal to the state level and reach local units, such as hospitals.
“The reliability of the federal government’s dose projections has not been great,” said Krager. “It makes planning a little more difficult. These are the challenges we are dealing with. “
Still, Krager is optimistic that things will continue to calm down and that Clark County will increase its vaccines soon, as long as there is an offer. He said the county has contingency plans for large-scale vaccination, even if it does not receive extra resources from the state and federal government.
“I understand people’s desire to be vaccinated and we are working as hard as possible to make this a reality,” said Krager. “We have difficult supply and logistics challenges, but we are working to overcome them.”