COVID vaccines to begin next week for hospital staff

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Hospital workers will be the first to receive the COVID-19 vaccine in Jackson County beginning next week, but the general public likely won’t have access to it until spring, local health officials said Tuesday.

“Being a health care facility, the time frame we’ve been told is Dec. 18 for the first needles in arms,” said Dr. Eric Fish, president and chief executive officer of Schneck Medical Center in Seymour.

During the hospital’s weekly community COVID update Tuesday, Fish reported Schneck had its highest number of COVID hospitalizations at 31. The county also had two additional COVID-related deaths and 34 new positive cases Tuesday.

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“We continue to see an increase,” he said. “Our ICUs are probably near capacity as well as other beds. We continue to monitor on a daily basis and make adjustments as needed.”

The increase in hospitalizations is a direct result of the high number of positive tests reported in the county a week to 10 days ago, Fish said.

Statewide, 14.2% of available hospital ventilators and 43.8% of intensive care unit beds are in use due to the virus.

“Hospitalizations statewide appear to have dropped over the last few days,” Fish said.

The Indiana State Department of Health has updated its quarantine guidelines to reflect changes from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Stacy East, infection preventionist at Schneck.

The option allows for people to end their quarantine after seven days instead of 14 if they test negative for the virus and had no symptoms or after 10 days with no test and no symptoms, she said.

Dr. Christopher Bunce, public health officer for the Jackson County Health Department, said the county will not use the seven-day option when it comes to quarantines due to the turnaround time for test results.

“It’s not workable,” he said. “There’s no way you’re going to get testing back within 48 hours for somebody on a seven-day plan. So what we’re saying is the completely asymptomatic person in quarantine can quarantine for 10 days, but we are not recommending a seven-day option.”

Bunce said he thought the county’s numbers could be heading in the right direction, but because of the lag in between reported positive cases and hospitalizations, it’s too early to tell.

“Some of our daily numbers do look a little better,” he said. “It does look like some of the things we are doing are bringing the numbers down a little bit now, but that won’t pay off for another 10 days. We’re hoping that we’re going to start to see some diminishment in hospitalizations.”

The county health department continues to work on its vaccine distribution plans, he said.

Karyn Fleetwood, executive director of Lutheran Community Home in Seymour, said the long-term care facility also is working on vaccination plans.

“We’ve partnered with CVS to come in and perform those vaccines for us, so we’re doing some training and some of the work that’s needed prior to those clinic dates being set,” she said.

The vaccine will be administered in phases, Bunce said.

“High priorities are going to be nursing facilities and first responders,” he said. “They’re going to get that before the general public does. I do not think the general public is going to be seeing a vaccine until at least the end of the first quarter of 2021.”

Bunce said the Pfizer vaccine that is coming out first is not the one Jackson County will be getting. Instead, the Moderna vaccine will likely be what is distributed locally because of its storage requirements, he said.

In the meantime, Schneck continues to treat some COVID patients with monoclonal antibody therapy.

“We have treated somewhere over 80 patients with that, and the intent of that medication is to neutralize response and decrease hospitalizations,” Bunce said. “To date, we have seen that to be effective, so we continue to monitor that.”

The state announced Tuesday that 2,940 Jackson County residents have tested positive for COVID-19 since the pandemic began in March, an increase of 34 from Monday’s report.

The positivity rate for Jackson County now stands at 19.2%, a 0.5% increase from Monday’s percentage.

Positivity rate is determined by a seven-day moving average with a six-day lag. It’s calculated by dividing the total number of positive tests by the total number of tests administered. The reason for the lag is to give time to receive comprehensive results.

The current positivity rate for Jackson County would be for Nov. 25 to Dec. 1.

Two new deaths attributed to COVID-19 were reported in Jackson County on Tuesday, meaning the death toll increases to 40.

There have been 27,634 tests administered overall in Jackson County since March 18, an increase of 323 from Sunday’s report.

The latest results were as of 11:59 p.m. Monday. The ISDH’s coronavirus dashboard is updated at noon daily.

On Tuesday, 5,457 additional Hoosiers across the state were diagnosed with COVID-19 through testing at the ISDH, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and private laboratories.

This brings the total number of Hoosiers known to have had the novel coronavirus to 392,663 following corrections to the previous day’s total.

Indiana’s total number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 is 6,109 with 124 new deaths being reported Tuesday.

For the state, a total of 4,656,827 tests have been administered, an increase of 42,618 from Monday’s reported total.

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