Second vaccine for LTC home residents

Many long-term care and retirement home residents in Windsor and Essex County will soon be protected from COVID-19 with the arrival of a shipment of the Moderna vaccine.

The Windsor-essex County Health Unit announced Wednesday morning it would receive enough doses of the Moderna vaccine to immunize residents at roughly half of the 44 long-term care and retirement homes in the region.

“I think there's a different energy here at the health unit,” said health unit CEO Theresa Marentette. “It brings hope.

“There is some relief and excitement — our goal all along with this pandemic has been to prevent people from becoming ill and people dying from this disease.”

The vaccines will be stored in a freezer previously sent to the health unit by the province.

They will be administered by eight to 10 public health nurses, who are specially trained for the job starting on Monday. To determine which long-term care homes receive the vaccine, the health unit is using a “risk-based prioritization matrix,” said medical officer of health Dr. Wajid Ahmed.

Homes already have classifications based on how old they are.

Older homes tend to have multiple residents living in shared rooms where the virus can spread more easily than in facilities with private rooms.

The size of a facility and the presence of a memory care unit — a place that provides specialized care for people with Alzheimer's and dementia — also contribute to the assessment of risk level.

The health unit also takes into consideration if a facility previously had a COVID-19 outbreak and how challenging it was to contain it. To date, 30 of the 44 long-term care and retirement homes in Windsor-essex have experienced outbreaks, some of them multiple times. Sixteen facilities had active outbreaks as of Wednesday.

High-risk facilities without active outbreaks will have their residents immunized first, Ahmed said. Next will be facilities with contained outbreaks — ones with very few cases and no ongoing transmission.

After both of those vaccination cycles are completed, the health unit would like to vaccinate residents at all homes in the region, but it will need to first receive additional doses from the province.

The health unit has created educational materials about the Moderna vaccine for homes to share with their residents, so individuals or their substitute decision makers can give informed consent. The vaccine is voluntary.

Marentette said she doesn't anticipate residents will reject the vaccine, though they have the right to.

“We've all been through this pandemic. We've all been waiting and hoping for the vaccine,” she said. “It is here. With it, there's relief, there's excitement and there's hope. I want people to get the answers to the questions they have.”

Health Canada approved the Moderna vaccine on Dec. 23, the same day personal support worker Krystal Meloche became the first person in Windsor-essex to receive the Pfizer vaccine at the St. Clair College Sportsplex.

Windsor-essex was chosen as one of the first regions in Ontario to receive shipments of both vaccines because of its high number of COVID-19 cases. The region has the highest weekly transmission rate in the province, and the highest rate of tests coming back positive.

An additional 163 cases were reported in the region on Wednesday, bringing the total number of infections to 7,374. There are 1,814 active cases locally, with 90 infected people in hospital, 19 of them in intensive care units.

Windsor Regional Hospital continues to immunize long-term care home staff at the Sportsplex with the Pfizer vaccine, which cannot be transported off-site due to its fragility. The hospital estimates that nearly 2,000 workers would be immunized by the first shipment it received, including a required second dose for each person several weeks after the first.

The Moderna vaccine needs to be kept cold, but only at around -20 C, and it can be transported to multiple locations after arriving in Windsor without compromising the doses. The Pfizer vaccine, however, must be stored at around -70 C and cannot be transported once delivered.

Although the Moderna vaccine's arrival means members of the most vulnerable population in Windsor-essex will be more protected against COVID-19, which has killed 79 residents of local long-term care and retirement homes, Ahmed emphasized people must continue to follow public health measures.

“It takes some time for the body to build immunity, and ... this is a very limited population we are talking about,” he said. Until a large-scale vaccine rollout is complete among the general public, which won't happen for several months, “all of these measures still need to be followed.”

Phase 1 of Ontario's three-phase vaccine implementation began on Dec. 15. Since then, 90,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine have been delivered to 19 sites across the province. The province can expect about 50,000 doses of the Moderna vaccine by year's end, according to a news release from the province on Wednesday.