First vaccine doses to go to state’s front-line medical providers and long-term care sites
Anticipation is building around the potentially imminent arrival of limited doses of a COVID-19 vaccine — that much was clear at a virtual briefing with Washington state health officials Wednesday.
Michele Roberts, who’s leading COVID-19 vaccine planning and distribution at the state Department of Health, shared updates on the preparation process and was empathetic when reporter after reporter asked about various details.
“I understand why everybody is interested — we are really all holding out hope for the vaccine,” Roberts said, especially given the current state of the coronavirus.
Earlier in the briefing, state health officials shared harrowing statistics on ever-increasing COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations.
Many hospitals are now canceling non-urgent procedures to make space and preserve staff for COVID-19 patient care, state Health Officer Dr. Kathy Lofy said.
Secretary of Health John Wiesman said an uptick in cases is expected due to last week’s Thanksgiving holiday. However, Lofy said it’s difficult to interpret case counts and test positivity rates around holidays because people’s “health care-seeking behavior” changes.
Lofy said deaths have been rising in the state: From about five reported per day in early September to about 12 deaths being reported per day.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has now received applications for Emergency Use Authorization from both Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, and DOH is hopeful there will be a vaccine to start administering in mid-December. The federal government estimated 62,400 doses of the Pfizer vaccine will arrive in a first allocation for Washington and about 200,000 doses will be here by the end of December, as McClatchy has previously reported.
Regular, weekly shipments “should begin in January,” according to an update last week from DOH.
Roberts said work to finish the initial vaccine allocation and prioritization framework is underway.
“This framework includes feedback from the communities, partners, sectors, and industries that are heavily impacted by COVID-19, and by the National Academies of Medicine’s Framework for Equitable Allocation of Vaccine for the Novel Coronavirus,” a DOH press release reads. “We are also using guidance from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).”
For now, it’s certain that the first phase of vaccination (referred to as “1A”) will “focus on workers in health care settings that serve patients who either have confirmed or suspected COVID-19 along with staff and residents of long-term care facilities,” Roberts said.
She said an estimated 300,000 health care workers in Washington state belong to that most at-risk category, though estimates like this are “an art,” not “an exact science.”
As of Tuesday, 116 providers had enrolled to become COVID-19 vaccine providers, Roberts said, more than twice the number DOH shared a week ago.
“We’re working hard to make sure that every county has at least one provider,” she said.
More will be known about who could be vaccinated in later phases after ACIP makes more decisions, she said, and DOH is working on tools that will help people figure out in what phase they’ll be eligible to get the vaccine.
It’s an exciting time, she said, but there’s still a lot to learn, such as how long the vaccines under consideration may protect a person.
“Getting vaccine to the people of Washington is a large and coordinated effort, and the timeline for all eligible people to receive vaccine will take many months,” she said.
New quarantine guidance
Health Officer Lofy said the state is planning to adopt new quarantine guidance released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Under the guidance, the CDC and DOH still recommend that people who might have been exposed to COVID-19 quarantine for 14 days, Lofy said.
A person in quarantine stays home, separates themselves from other people, keeps tabs on their health, and follows health department direction, according to the CDC. The “isolation” process, in contrast, applies to someone who is infected.
The new CDC guidance, though, offers people two options to reduce their time in quarantine. A caveat: Local public health authorities make the final decision on how long quarantine should last locally, according to the CDC.
Someone in quarantine who doesn’t have COVID-19 symptoms can end quarantine on Day 7 if they’ve received a negative test result from a test collected within 48 hours, under the new guidance. They can end it on Day 10 without a test.
But they still need to monitor for symptoms the full 14 days, Lofy said, and isolate if they start experiencing symptoms.
Lofy said she agrees with the CDC’s reasoning for the new guidance: A shorter quarantine may ease the burden and increase compliance, the logic goes.
Two weeks of quarantine can affect physical and mental health and create an economic burden that reduces compliance, according to the CDC. It also can amp up pressure on public health systems and “dissuade recently diagnosed people from naming contacts and may dissuade contacts from responding to contact tracer outreach. …”
It’ll take a couple days to update documents on the DOH website that include information on quarantine, Lofy said.
This story was originally published December 3, 2020 at 5:45 AM.
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