‘Need to be patient.’ Lexington has its 1st COVID-19 vaccines. When will you get one?
While the first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine were arriving in Lexington Monday to be administered to health care workers, the city was working on getting the vaccine to those next in line.
“We have no idea exactly how many doses we will be getting and when,” said Susan Straub, spokeswoman for Mayor Linda Gorton’s office.
Lexington’s first vaccine doses were sent directly to Baptist Health Lexington and University of Kentucky Chandler Hospital. Local nursing homes were also expected to get doses administered by Walgreens and CVS through federal partnerships.
Along with nursing homes and health care workers, Phase 1 of the state’s vaccination process incorporates first responders, including Lexington police and firefighters, and people with significant underlying conditions, according to documents from the state Department for Public Health.
Lexington-Fayette County Health Department officials have followed the state guidelines while working on specific plans for subsequent vaccine deployment phases. Few details were publicly released, but eventually, the health department and city could use mobile vaccination sites with drive-through options.
The mayor’s office, Lexington Emergency Management, the local health department, local hospitals and the governor’s office have been involved in regular discussions, Straub said.
“We’ve been talking about this for several months,” Straub said. “Information changes daily about the vaccine, as you might expect, so our plan continues to change.”
Lexington police officers and firefighters will be among those next up, according to the mayor’s office.
The city is “working on a mechanism” to get that done, Straub said.
Lexington police officers who have the most contact with the public — patrol and traffic officers — will be prioritized within the department, according to police spokeswoman Brenna Angel. The vaccine won’t be made mandatory for officers, Angel said.
Jordan Saas, battalion chief for the Lexington Fire Department, said Monday that distribution for firefighters was “still in the planning phase.”
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was approved for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration, and Gov. Andy Beshear said Monday the Moderna vaccine was expected to be approved in the coming days.
Those vaccines are critical in the fight against an illness that has killed more than 300,000 people in the United States. COVID-19 has killed 143 people in Lexington. It’s infected more than 20,000 local residents, resulting in more than 1,000 hospitalizations.
Nursing home vaccines will be administered in late December
The vaccines going to nursing homes and other long-term care facilities are being handled by CVS and Walgreens, according to Beshear. CVS and Walgreens got federal contracts for vaccinating nursing home residents, Beshear said. The two companies initially were getting more than 25,000 doses combined.
A CVS spokesman said it was handling vaccinations at 332 facilities in Kentucky but didn’t say which Lexington facilities it would vaccinate. Walgreens didn’t provide specific details for its vaccinations in Kentucky or in Lexington.
The earliest vaccinations could begin in long-term care facilities is Dec. 21, according to Joseph Goode, a spokesman for CVS. Beshear said Monday that the goal was to have every nursing home resident vaccinated within two months.
Lexington VA selected for early doses
The Lexington VA Health Care System is one of 37 U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs facilities that will get COVID-19 vaccines for health care workers and veterans in long-term care facilities, according to the Department of Veteran Affairs.
“As vaccine supplies increase, additional veterans will receive vaccinations based on factors such as age, existing health problems and other considerations that increase the risk of severe illness or death from COVID-19,” the department said in a statement.
Veterans looking for more information were encouraged to visit the veteran affairs website.
“We are very excited to provide a vaccine that has the potential to help get COVID-19 under control when used alongside public health measures such as masking, physical distancing and frequent handwashing,” Gregory Goins, the Lexington VA system director, said in a statement.
Lexington’s current timeline for Phase 2 and beyond
Initial shipments won’t include enough doses for all health care employees or nursing home residents or enough to immediately start vaccinating other groups like first responders. But more deliveries are expected over the coming weeks.
The subsequent state schedule is broken into phases and uses guidance from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee on Equitable Allocation of Vaccine for the Novel Coronavirus. It also calls on guidance from Johns Hopkins University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Guidance from those groups indicates phase 2 would include K-12 teachers, school staff, child care workers, critical workers in high-risk settings, people with moderate underlying conditions, people in homeless shelters or other group homes and all older adults.
The Lexington-Fayette County Detention Center could fall into the later stages of phase 1 or phase 2, according to state planning documents. City officials were working on a plan for jail vaccinations, Straub said.
Phase 3 includes young adults, children and workers in industries important to societal functions and phase 4 would vaccinate the general population.
Mobile vaccination operations in Lexington by summer?
Lexington is working on specific details for phases two, three and four, according to the health department. Regardless of the plans, the city will need people to be willing to get vaccinated.
“The next phases will require more community buy-in and, therefore, a broader messaging strategy,” Straub said.
Dr. Kraig Humbaugh, Lexington’s commissioner of health, said he’s hopeful that vaccinations will be widely available to Lexington residents by the summer of 2021. He plans to step down from his position in the summer.
When more vaccine is available, the health department has considered mobile vaccination events, which could feature drive-through vaccinations. That was why the health department ran a drive-through flu vaccine event this year.
“We’ve done drive-throughs before, but it had been 10 to 12 years since we’ve done one,” said Kevin Hall, spokesman for the Lexington Health Department. He added that the agency had practiced for mass vaccinations. A drive-through vaccination clinic for the H1N1 outbreak 10 years ago was “tremendously helpful,” Hall said.
In this year’s drive-through flu vaccine event, the health department’s information technology team built a digital registration program. Nurses rehearsed giving shots and maintaining physical distance while wearing adequate personal protective equipment. Police officers and firefighters were also on scene for crowd control and in case of emergency.
There’s a lot left to be determined. The health department was working on storage needs for the doses, Hall said. The vaccines are temperature-sensitive and need to be kept at temperatures ranging from 8 degrees Celsius to -80 degrees Celsius, according to Kentucky’s vaccine distribution plan.
There are also specific requirements for administering, documenting and reporting the use of the vaccine. Every vaccination provider has to be able to properly report data to the state health department. Vaccine reminders have to be sent out to participants for the additional follow-up dose.
And the plans in place now may not be the same once the vaccine is available to the general public, Hall said.
“There’s still so much to know about the vaccine,” he said.
Meanwhile, limited availability of the vaccine in December may lead to residents relaxing their compliance with masks, social distancing and other preventative measures.
“Until it’s widely available for the public in 2021, we have to continue fighting this virus together,” Hall said.
This story was originally published December 15, 2020 at 7:48 AM.