If you are 65 years old or older, live in Berrien County, and have signed up at either the Berrien County Health Department’s website or on Spectrum Health Lakeland’s MyChart to get the COVID-19 vaccination, you’re in good company. Which also means you may be in for a bit of a wait.
Berrien County Health Department Officer Nicki Britten and Spectrum Health Lakeland President Dr. Loren Hamel took to Facebook live today for another update on the current situation in the region, with news that more than 14,000 people aged 65 and up have already signed on to the wait list with more arriving by the hour.
Britten promises the community-at-large they are working as a team, saying, “I really want to reiterate to everybody that the Health Department and Spectrum Health Lakeland are working in lockstep for one strategy for our community and as partners we’re doing the pieces that make the most sense for how to most efficiently serve the community as a whole.”
Further explaining, Britten says, “We’ve both been working through those 1A health care workers and assuring that the long term care facilities were our top priorities. Now that we have expanded into eligibility for older adults and a little bit broader professions are getting started, however I don’t need to say this to anybody, but demand for the vaccine far outstrips the supply. We’ve probably got about 40,000 people that are eligible for vaccination in Berrien County right now, and nowhere even close to that amount of vaccine available to do the vaccines.” She adds, “We do have a waitlist at the Health Department, and right now we have 14,000 people, 65-plus, who are on that waitlist. So, it’s going to take a little bit of time for us to be able to work through that.”
Britten reports that at the same time that her team is starting to vaccinate older adults, Spectrum Health Lakeland is also vaccinating older adults, and they are working from the same community list, so if you’ve signed up at one place, you’re signed up at the other. Britten adds, “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that one way is faster than the other, and we’re working together to make sure that we can do this as efficiently and quickly as possible.”
She also reviewed the risk factors and where they’re prioritizing right now, saying, “We are focusing primarily on older adults, in that 1B category of eligibility as well as first responders and some other professions in that 1B category that are eligible, but we want to have a focus on those that are most susceptible to morbidity and mortality to try to protect the most vulnerable as we’re continuing to also protect the healthcare system by vaccinating healthcare workers.”
Dr. Loren Hamel reports that at Spectrum Health Lakeland, they have immunized at least first dose, and in some cases second doses for healthcare workers, adding, “So just about everybody that wants a dose has had a dose,” and reports, “We are also planning for everybody who got the first dose to get their second dose.”
Hamel expressed delight over the health system’s ability to have enough of the vaccine to start immunizing the community as well, telling us, “We gave out over 1,200 vaccines this week, and have been absolutely coordinating with the Berrien County Health Department to make sure we’re getting everybody that has signed up, in a fair and equitable way, a dose.” He cautions, however, “It will take a while to get through that list, obviously, and we are hoping for a few thousand doses this next week, but we can’t predict that, we don’t know that factor. We’re going to ask for more doses than we expect to get, and I hope we’re blessed with all of those doses, but I’m hoping we’ll get a couple thousand doses and our commitment is to give them all away.”
Hamel says that yesterday, the hospital gave nearly 600 shots at one community clinic and they are planning for capacity of one to two-thousand in a clinic, so they are going to always be ready for additional supply if they get it. He promises, “We will never have the constraint where we get way more vaccine doses than we can give away, because we want you to have the shot, and if we have doses just hanging around, we might get less on the next allocation, so we want to make sure that every dose that we can possibly administer is done every week that we receive the vaccine, and we’ll plan that for next week as well.”
Hamel is grateful that the community is stepping up, saying, “We were absolutely thrilled to see the elderly community in such huge numbers queueing up for the vaccine with smiles on their faces and sometimes tears in their eyes to finally have something that we hope will curtail and ultimately stop this disease.”
Britten was also cautious in her optimism and urges patience among the public, reporting, “With some of the unpredictability of the vaccine supply, sometimes until we receive notification once a week, we just don’t know how much vaccine we’ll get the next week. We really don’t know. So we are really working to plan far out at both the health department and Spectrum Health Lakeland where we have a good idea of what we want to be planning for the next six weeks’ worth of clinics, and while we’re ramping up our capacity, you might not be aware of clinics until a few days ahead of time, because we want to make sure that by the time we you have an appointment scheduled, we’re sure you have a vaccine.”
So, if you are on a wait list, and have signed up either through Lakeland’s MyChart or through the Health Department’s website, both health care leaders want you to keep checking your email at least daily so that when your time comes up you may not have a lot of time to plan, suggesting that as appointment slots become available it might be with just a few days’ notice.
Both Britten and Hamel reported on the latest numbers, with Britten saying, “We have seen a downward trend over the last month or so, in the terms of number of confirmed cases, percent positivity, and even some hospitalizations, so we have been very encouraged by that downward slide.” She also warns, “What we are seeing though, within the last week or so, is that the number of cases is slowly starting to creep up again. It’s hard to say whether that means we are on a true upward trajectory that will be sustained or if this will be just a little bit of variation at a plateau, but this is a really important reminder that these numbers are fragile, and they’re very sensitive to changes in how we’re living our lives, so it continues to be really, really important that people wear their masks, social distance, avoid close contact with others.” She adds, “We still have a significant amount of community transmission, not at the levels we were in November, but we’re still three times higher than how we started October, so while we’re in a more comfortable place, and have a little bit more breathing room, and are not as concerned about overwhelming our healthcare system, it doesn’t take a whole lot for us to get there. It can be easy to say ‘okay we’ve got the vaccine, and we’ve been talking a lot about the fact that thousands of people in our community have been vaccinated,’ it’s still easy to take our foot off the gas and get a little bit lax about some of those things, but I want to encourage everybody to think about the vaccine as more of an investment strategy for a long term investment. We’re going to be putting a lot of effort into putting vaccines into that account and see it pay dividends by the summer or maybe late spring, but right now we still have to wear a mask, social distance, avoid close contact with others.”
Dr. Hamel reports, “Inpatient, positive COVID cases are running at just about the same number as a week ago, and that’s really encouraging. It has been declining, but has not really continued to decline in recent days so we’re at a plateau stage, and we are just hoping that the plateau will turn into a downward trend, and not turn into an upward trend, but that depends largely on you, so we certainly encourage you to be incredibly careful.”
Hamel reminds everyone that people are still succumbing to COVID, saying, “We still, in Berrien County, are losing a number of our residents to COVID 19. They are passing away most days. If you look at the Health Department dashboard, and look at the mortality rate, it’s pretty easy to see that since this began we have lost a lot of our friends and neighbors, about 200, if you add the probable cases. We want that to stop. We can do that with immunizations and good behaviors, and help that stop so we’re hopeful that that trend in deaths will start to decline very soon.”
In that regard, Britten says that close followers of the Health Department’s dashboard may have noticed a new addition, saying, “For those who have been following the trends on the Berrien County Health Department website dashboard, a new addition this week has been that we’ve added “Probable Deaths” to the dashboard, and have received a lot of questions about that.”
She explains, “Our dashboard has included “Deaths” of many people who have had confirmed COVID 19, and there’s a certain definition of what it means to have confirmed COVID-19, and it’s a certain type of laboratory test we have to have to fit that confirmed criteria. There’s another definition of the “Probable” cases, and that certain rapid antigen test only reveal probable, not necessarily confirmed cases, as well as some other epidemiological indicators that could cause someone to be a probable case. Those deaths that are listed “Probable Deaths” are people who died who were probable cases, not necessarily confirmed.” She concludes, “As we have seen the expansion of rapid antigen testing, we are seeing more people that hit that “probable” case definition as opposed to those that are confirmed and if we do add them expiring, that’s where they would fit on that dashboard.”
