According to Caitlin Hodge of the Chickahominy Health
District (CHD), which includes Goochland County, the robust response to the
news that the Covid vaccine will soon be available overwhelmed its voice and
email systems. They are working on a fix and will reply as soon as possible.
The CHD and Goochland County are collaborating on plans to
roll out the vaccination locally but are not ready to announce details. It is
hoped that there will be something ready by the end of January.
“The situation is very fluid; a lot depends on the availability
of vaccine,” said Paul Drumwright, administrative services manager for the county.
Hodge reported that CHD is also working closely with the county
to establish a Goochland centric hotline, staffed by knowledgeable people, to provide
information and answer questions about the vaccine soon, perhaps as early as
late next week.
“We are excited that so many people want to be vaccinated,”
Hodge said. But the devil in in the details. “The Covid vaccine is new.
Administering it is different from things we’ve been dealing with for a long
time, and it takes time to get up to speed with the new process.”
While the CHD is anxious to inoculate many people as soon as
possible, “it must be done in a safe manner to ensure a high level of trust in
the vaccine,” Hodge said. Currently, priority is being given to the 1a category.
They hope to move to 1b next week. See https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/covid-19-vaccine/
Governor Ralph Northam recently added teachers
and those 65 and over to the 1b list.
Special training is needed to administer the vaccine. Currently, CHD does not have enough people on
staff to give shots, conduct testing, and perform contact tracing for Covid
cases. CHD is working to build partnerships with public and provide entities to
expand opportunities to get the vaccine. This could include deploying the
national guard and area health professionals, including paramedics to provide
widespread inoculation as soon as possible, in a safe manner. “We don’t want
people to think we have prioritized speed over safety,” she said.
Goochland, said Hodge, is a wonderful partner and is working
to staff the Covid information hotline and hold vaccination clinics locally. “People
have lots of questions and they need to be able to get good information from a
trusted source.”
Notice of a vaccination clinic in Henrico that circulated on
the internet last night filled all appointments in a matter of hours. Hodge
expects more of these large clinics to be announced in coming weeks.
GOMM will pass along information about vaccine clinics as it
is received. Things are changing rapidly. Stay tuned.
4 comments:
Thanks for the update. I think we have to remind ourselves, that initially it was thought that it could take as long as 2 years for a vaccine, so a little patience is called for.
No patience. They knew this was coming and had ample time to prepare. They have and are screwing up. As of yesterday Texas had administered ONE MILLION vaccines. Virginia had done less than a quarter of that.
I hope that you are referring to the Governor screwing up and not our county or the Chickahominy health disctrict. When a plan is carefully made to spread out the demand and prioritize groups, then our Governor steps in and suddently dumps everyone 65 and older into an earlier group, no one could see that coming. Especially in Goochland county, asking our large senior citizen population to attend clinics at the same time as our first reponders and teachers is actually a risk to them instead of a benefit, considering the number of people that our first responders and teachers are in contact with daily. Patience is truly appropriate here when an unpredictable and irrational Governor is mis-micromanaging health matters. We would be lucky to have the caliber of Governor that Texas has.
Yes why on earth add younger folks to a category unless prioritizing can be implemented and insured.
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