Delays in new shipments of COVID-19 vaccines are forcing South Carolina hospitals to reschedule appointments and stop accepting new ones.
The setback comes when state and federal authorities started sending fewer doses of vaccine, but increasing the number of times they are given, instead of one or two large weekly shipments, according to South Carolina hospital systems.
Hospital leaders say the change is largely about optics – states are reducing the supply they keep on hand because they want their vaccination rates to appear more efficient – but this is causing problems.
“The result is a really complex issue when it comes to scheduling,” said Dr. Danielle Scheurer, director of quality for the MUSC Health System, in an online post. “How, in good conscience, do you schedule patients to get the vaccine when you are not even sure if you will receive it? We literally don’t know what we’re getting week after week until we open that box. “
This is not the first time the doses have run out.
Thousands of appointments had to be canceled last month, when those aged 70 and over became eligible, and hospitals made appointments based on the incorrect assumption that their future supplies shipments would be much larger.
The latest delays occurred in the same week that South Carolina expanded the vaccine’s eligibility to 309,000 seniors aged 65 to 69 years.
Dr. Robert Oliverio, CEO of Roper St. Francis Physician Partners, said the hospital’s system paused the scheduling of any new appointments for COVID-19 vaccines to ensure that existing appointments made by mid-March are honored.
“If the supply of the vaccine drops considerably, that could change,” he said.
The hospital system may also resort to using first doses as second doses to ensure that everyone who has already received the first dose can receive the second.
“We are running week after week,” said Oliverio. “We will probably be fine until next Tuesday or Wednesday. But it really depends on what’s on the truck. “
MUSC spokeswoman Heather Woolwine also acknowledged on February 9 that the hospital’s system may need to change vaccination appointments. She said MUSC Health apologizes to patients for “the inconvenience and frustration that rescheduling appointments can cause”.
To compensate, Scheurer said MUSC is pushing as many commitments as possible towards the end of the week and has frozen all new commitments.
“All we can manage is what we are given and now we are not getting much,” she said.
Prisma Health, the state’s largest health care provider, said it was informed on February 5 that its supply would come in stages over several days this week, instead of Monday and Tuesday morning.
It received only a partial supply in the interior of the state on February 9.
“And we still don’t know how much of the rest of the supply we will receive this week,” said Dr. Saria Saccocio, co-leader of the vaccination task force Prisma Health, in a statement.
Prisma said it was unable to accept more visits during the week after a wave of demand from the first wave of newly eligible seniors.
“The 65 to 69 year old group appeared in overwhelming numbers today and we ran out of our vaccine stock for this week,” said Saccocio.
Altogether, 1.3 million people in South Carolina are on the eligibility list, which already included seniors aged 70 and over, health professionals of all types and long-term residents.
As of Monday, some 471,000 South Carolinaians had received at least their initial injection, and more than 410,000 doses were booked through consultations, according to the state Department of Health and Environmental Control.
The announcement was also made on a day when lawmakers resumed the debate on how to vaccinate educators without interrupting senior students’ appointments, with the goal of getting students back to school in a full five-day week across the state before the school year is basically over.
DHEC officials said the only way to get shot in the arms of more than 71,000 K-12 employees across the state willing to roll up their sleeves now would be to divert all doses for two weeks for the effort, canceling vaccine time slots reserved for commitments.