Massive COVID-19 vaccination site coming to Portsmouth on Monday

Virginians are able to pre-register on state system

PORTSMOUTH — Gov. Ralph Northam announced Tuesday that three community vaccination clinics will be opening across the state — in Danville, Petersburg and Portsmouth.

“You’ve seen massive clinics on TV like at Dodger Stadium,” Northam said. “Virginia won’t be that big, but these are intended to be large-scale events able to vaccinate from several hundred to several thousand in a day.”

“We’re working to identify sites that will help us vaccinate people equitably.”

Across the commonwealth, white people have received the most doses, about 664,000, and Black people just a fraction of that, with 125,000, and Latino people with about 52,000, according to the Virginia Department of Health.

There’s also a racial gap among the people who are fully inoculated. About 359,000 white people are vaccinated, compared with 56,000 Black people and 27,000 Latino people.

Portsmouth, with a population that is54% Black, has seen disparities in the pandemic. Black residents account for almost 60% of cases in which the person’s race is reported. Similarly, Black residents account for about 60% of the city’s COVID-related deaths. Meanwhile, only 44% of vaccine doses in Portsmouth have gone to Black residents.

The Portsmouth clinic will open Monday and the goal is to provide up to a thousand vaccines per day, but officials hope to ramp up as needed and when more vaccine becomes available, a spokesperson from the Virginia Department of Emergency Management wrote in an email.

The sites are supported by funding from the Federal Emergency Management Association, which is working with localities across the country.

The exact location in Portsmouth has not been publicly announced, and officials are still finalizing details.

VDEM has not yet said which vaccines will be available at the site.

It will be open to people already preregistered in the state system, and the groups selected will be based on the current phase. Right now, people in phases 1a and 1b are eligible. That includes frontline medical workers, teachers, people older than 65 and people between the ages of 16 and 64 with certain high-risk medical conditions.

The city identified about 6,000 people in 1a and about 20,000 in 1b, according to a presentation given to City Council in January. But the health department only has the capacity to vaccinate 1,200 people per week. The presentation included a line that said “we must partner to expand our reach.”

“We are starting with the top 20% of vulnerable localities in the Commonwealth,” Lauren Opett, the director of communications and chief agency spokesperson for the VDEM, wrote in an email.

When Portsmouth’s health district began holding vaccine clinics in January, staff only had the capacity to administer doses two days a week. The department brought in emergency medical staff to assist and expanded to three days per week.

Dr. Lauren James, director of the Portsmouth Health District, told the City Council in January that staffing was their main limiting factor.

With the help of EMS staff, the district could administer 1,200 doses per week, so even if they received more doses, they didn’t have people available to give them.

At the time, her entire staff was dedicated to the clinics and contact tracing, leaving no one available to take calls or answer many of the hundreds of questions coming in per day.

The Pilot was not able to reach officials from the Portsmouth Health District for this story.

As of Wednesday, Portsmouth had administered about 10,500 vaccine doses, according to the Virginia Department of Health’s website. About 4,000 people are fully inoculated. .

About 7,900 people in Portsmouth have tested positive and 151 people have died.

As additional vaccines become available, the state will open additional sites.

“We are looking at several localities and examining the best places for CVCs (community vaccination clinics) within those localities,” wrote Jason Elmore, the deputy director of communications for VDEM, in an email.

“The operation of these sites is based on the need and vaccine availability.”

Virginia has administered about 2.4 million vaccine doses, as of Wednesday, and about 850,000 are fully inoculated.

Of Virginia’s 8.5 million residents, 18 percent have received at least one dose.