REGIONAL- While a massive public response to a statewide rollout of pilot COVID-19 vaccination sites on Tuesday threatened to overwhelm a registration website and phone banks, Cook Hospital Director of Nursing Nichole Chiabotti and her colleagues stayed focused on what they’ve been doing since December, managing and administering vaccinations for hospital staff, emergency responders, and the Cook Care Center.
“We’re actually in the second week of giving second doses,” Chiabotti said. “Last week we had 57 staff members that got their second dose, and we have about 30 staff members that will be getting their second dose this week.”
Still, not all staff members chose to participate when the first doses were administered on Dec. 22, Chiabotti said. Many expressed reservations about the safety of the vaccine, although some have changed their minds after seeing how those vaccinated have fared. Only one person experienced side effects with the first shot, and just two have exhibited side effects so far after receiving a second dose.
“We are at about 65 percent of our staff that have been vaccinated,” Chiabotti said. “We have staff members that have some medical issues going on who can’t get vaccinated right now. The rest of them aren’t willing to get the vaccine. We’ve done a lot of educating and we’re continuing to reach out to those staff members on an individual basis and provide them with a lot of scientific medical information to encourage them to obtain the vaccine. We did get five more people to sign up this week, so our percentage will go up a little bit more.”
In addition to their own staff, Cook Hospital has administered the vaccine to the ambulance crews in Orr and Cook and the Bois Forte Police, using the Pfizer vaccine distributed weekly from the Hibbing hospital through the regional Northeast Healthcare Preparedness Coalition, Chiabotti said.
And illustrating the challenge of coordinating distribution of the vaccine across multiple providers and settings, the county health department also set up a clinic at the Cook Ambulance hall to vaccinate emergency responders.
“They showed up in Cook to do some vaccinations and all the EMS folks that wanted the vaccine had already come in through the hospital to get their vaccine,” Chiabotti said.
Hospital staff have also administered the Moderna vaccine to those in the Cook Care Center who wanted to receive it. Cook Hospital offered to assist with vaccinations at area assisted living facilities, which fall under the responsibility of the federally managed pharmacy vaccination program, but the offer was declined, Chiabotti said. Given immense issues with scheduling and staffing, that wasn’t a problem for Chiabotti.
“This is a small facility, and we all have our own jobs that we have to do on top of this. We don’t have that luxury of having extra staff available to take on all these huge, massive projects. We’re doing it just fine, it’s working very well, and we have a great team that is working on the vaccination efforts. But we still have our normal jobs to do as well.”
For now, hospitals are part of the effort to vaccinate the general public. That responsibility lies in part with community health clinics like Scenic Rivers Health Services in Cook and Tower, which has created some confusion among those seeking vaccinations.
“It’s very common for people in the community to confuse the hospital and the Scenic Rivers clinic,” Chiabotti said. “We are in the same building, we have the same physicians, but we’re two separate entities. The clinic is getting their own supply of vaccine. We’re set up to vaccinate our staff and everyone that is part of our entity, but we’ve never done public vaccinations before. That goes through the clinic systems.”
Chiabotti said that if hospitals are eventually recruited to bolster the public vaccination campaign, they would work closely with Scenic Rivers to facilitate the program.
The best advice for people wanting to get vaccinated is for them to work through their primary physician or healthcare provider, Chiabotti said.
“I know some clinics have waiting lists. Some clinics are going to do notifications via text message,” she said. “Your best bet is to contact your primary care physician or provider and find out what the process will be.”
Antibody treatments
Cook Hospital offers the monoclonal antibody treatments that can decrease the severity of COVID-19 and the chances of needing hospitalizations and emergency room visits, but Chiabotti said that the treatment often can’t be used if people weren’t tested when they first develop COVID-19 symptoms.
“If you are positive and have some underlying health conditions, that monoclonal therapy could prevent you from getting severe illness, but you have to get it within ten days of onset of symptoms,” Chiabotti said. “The trickiest thing with monoclonal therapy is that people aren’t getting tested right away when they become symptomatic, so by the time they come in and get tested and get the results, it’s been more than ten days.”
Thirteen patients have received monoclonal antibody treatments at Cook Hospital, but others have likely missed out because they didn’t get tested when they first started showing symptoms, Chiabotti said. The treatment has to be prescribed by a physician who has evaluated a patient against a number of other criteria, but it has to happen within that ten-day window.
“We’re really trying to encourage the testing sooner rather than later,” she said.
As with vaccines, the hospital doesn’t provide testing for the general public, although they do administer a rapid test for emergency room patients with severe symptoms. Chiabotti encouraged people to arrange for testing through their community health clinics.
State pilot sites
The landscape for vaccination plans across the country changed dramatically last week with the Trump administration’s surprise announcement that it was scrapping their original directive to target discrete small groups. Instead, to boost the number of people getting vaccinated, anyone age 65 and above would now be eligible to receive the vaccine. All vaccines being held back for later delivery for second doses would be released as well to speed up the process.
Gov. Tim Walz and state health officials took a “trust but verify” stance in response to the announcements, a reaction that was correctly prudent when just days later the administration admitted they didn’t have a second-dose reserve – all of its vaccine supply was already allocated and distributed.
However, late last week Minnesota officials embraced the 65-and-older eligibility criteria, and on Monday increased the pool even more by including child care workers and K-12 teachers in the group eligible to be vaccinated this Friday and Saturday at one of nine pilot vaccination sites throughout the state. Health officials estimated this expansion made an additional one million Minnesotans eligible to be vaccinated.
But Walz warned on Monday that the state’s weekly federal allotment of 60,000 doses was woefully short of meeting the anticipated demand, and health officials confirmed that only 11,000 of those doses would be available through the pilot sites, including one in Mt. Iron.
When the pilot site registration website and phone center opened at noon on Tuesday, overwhelming demand far outstripped the meager supply. State Infectious Disease Director Kris Ehresmann issued a press release late that afternoon detailing the deluge.
“Since registration opened at noon today, we’ve experienced continuous high call volume to the vaccine registration call center and traffic to the web registration page,” Ehresmann said. “More than 232,000 calls have been processed through the call center as of 3:45 p.m., and at the peak the website was processing more than 10,000 hits per second.”
The online site experienced slowdowns and was temporarily closed to better manage the traffic, Ehresmann said, but they didn’t stop processing registrations. As of 4:15 p.m., 5,000 people had been scheduled for first and second vaccination appointments.
“Unfortunately, there is no way to get around the fact there will be frustrations as we continue to deal with the extreme supply shortage,” Ehresmann said. “What we are seeing is extraordinarily pent-up demand for vaccine. Nearly one million Minnesotans age 65 and over are trying to get a few thousand doses of vaccines that have been made available to Minnesota.”
Another round of appointments will open up on Tuesday, Jan. 26 at noon. Register online at https://mn.gov/covid19/vaccine/find-vaccine/index.jsp, or call 833-431-2053.