Extraordinary story out of Northern California.
For me, the most depressing aspect of the pandemic, particularly over the past few weeks, has been the lack of urgency and focus. It is bad enough in normal times living in a solution-phobic society where navel gazing and hot takes now pass for public discourse, but in a time of crisis, it's the stuff of madness.
While thousands are dying each day and a frightening new variant is emerging, we have at least five vaccines ranging from pretty good to exceptional (two from the US, one from Great Britain, one from Russia and one from China). We should be moving as fast as possible, up to a occasionally beyond the bounds of safety to get shots in as many arms as possible and probably go ahead and pull the trigger on AstraZeneca as well.
Ukiah is a poor rural town of about 16,000. They have few resources and lots of challenges, but they responded to a crisis like it was a crisis which these days is sadly the exception rather than the rule.
Anita Chabria writing for the LA Times.
At 11:35 on Monday morning, senior staff at Adventist Health Ukiah Valley Medical Center in Mendocino County were holding their first 2021 executive meeting when the hospital pharmacist interrupted: The compressor on a freezer storing 830 doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine had stopped working hours earlier, and the alarm meant to guard against such failure had failed.
The doses were quickly thawing.
“It was not how my day was planned,” said Adventist spokeswoman Cici Winiger, who was in the executive meeting. “At that point it was all hands on deck, drop everything.”
The Moderna vaccine is shipped and stored at frozen temperatures, and stays stable up to 8 degrees Celsius in a regular refrigerator for up to 30 days. But once it reaches room temperature, as it did in the Adventist freezer, it must be used within 12 hours. By the time the freezer problem was discovered, the vials had been creeping toward warm for some time.
Medical staff estimated they had two hours to use them before they would no longer be viable.
With the minutes ticking down, the medical team made the decision that the goal would be to inject every dose, regardless of state guidelines. The medical team believed that “the more people we vaccinate just brings us closer to herd immunity,” Winiger said.
Winiger got on the phone, trying to give the shots first to those on the priority lists. One local elder care facility took 40 doses for staff, and the hospital’s chief medical officer drove them to the facility himself.
About 200 doses belong to the county and were being stored by the hospital. Winiger said those doses were returned to the county. The county in turn gave 100 doses to the city of Ukiah, county Chief Executive Carmel J. Angelo said.
...
An additional 100 doses hit the fire department about 12:15 p.m., Fire Chief Doug Hutchison said. At first, garbled information he received through phone calls left him fearing all 800 doses were coming his way, leaving him thinking, “There is no way,” he said. His full-time staff of 16 had already been promised to help with other clinics.
Hutchison headed to a city conference center, and his remaining crew “began giving shots as fast as we could sit people down and roll up their sleeve,” he said. Their syringes went into the arms of police, essential city staff and firefighters — including Hutchison, who had declined earlier offerings of the vaccine to make sure his staff got it first.
“I was trying to make sure all my people got shots before I did,” he said.
...In Mendocino County, Bednar, the sheriff’s lieutenant, was one of those who received the initial dose Monday, though he isn’t yet sure how he feels about it.
“It’s one of those things where I was a little hesitant at first because it’s a new vaccine,” he said. “But I have family that is older, and it’s better that I get it than possibly risk their safety.”
Even as the shots were being delivered to the jail, a big-rig accident on one of the main highways cut the hospital off from its sister facility about 20 minutes away, Winiger said, making it impossible to reach. Ukiah, a town of about 20,000 surrounded by state and national forest, has a population spread through its rural and often difficult-to-navigate territory, creating a daunting challenge to quickly deliver the doses to remote areas.
The Adventist staff turned instead to the local community, with about 600 shots remaining.
First, they sent a text asking every available medical professional to turn out at one of four sites to give the vaccines and monitor those who took them.
“We had nurses, pharmacists, physicians, even those that are not part of the hospital, coming to help,” said Judson Howe, president for Adventist Health in Mendocino County. “It was all hands on deck and a true community effort.”
Then hospital staff blasted out a text to employees letting people know that anyone who showed up could have the shot. “We just wanted to make sure none of this goes to waste,” Winiger said.
By noon, within 15 minutes after learning of the freezer failure, shots were being administered at all four sites. Lines began to form as word spread and some staff was siphoned off for crowd control. At the site Winiger ran, about 30 people were turned away after the doses ran out. At the main site near the hospital, she estimates about 120 people left without the shot.
But by the two-hour deadline, every dose had found a patient, Winiger said.
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