RAPPAHANNOCK COVID-19 CASES HIGHEST OF PANDEMIC

After rocky start, vaccine rollout picks up speed

With Virginia’s public health officials announcing earlier this week that the first case of the United Kingdom variant of COVID-19 has been discovered in Northern Virginia, the urgency to administer vaccines has never been more pressing.

Per capita, meanwhile, the test positivity rate of the coronavirus in Rappahannock County has reached the “extremely high” category, with 42 new confirmed cases in the past 7 days through Wednesday. When a test positivity rate is very high, there is a possibility that cases are actually being undercounted.

As for vaccines, early studies of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna variants seem to indicate that

both are effective against the highly transmissible U.K. variant, but the results have yet to be peer reviewed. Though this is good news, it still may take several months for most Virginians to get either vaccine.

Numbers of COVID-19 cases are staying high in the commonwealth, with more than 30,000 Virginians testing positive for the virus each week, according to the Virginia Department of Health. Last week the New York Times reported that Virginia is one of six states where the daily average of new cases is more than 15 new cases per 100,000 people over the past week.

But Governor Ralph Northam is urging Virginians to be patient and to continue washing their hands, wearing face coverings and practicing physical distancing. “I want Virginians to be patient,” Governor Ralph Northam said last Thursday. “I want them to know we are going to get to everybody. We’re going to do it as quickly as we can, as expeditiously as we can and as equitably as we can.”

105,000 DOSES PER WEEK

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced that starting next week his administration will increase vaccine distribution to the states from 8.6 million per week to 10 million per week, at least for the next three weeks.

Officials don’t yet know what that means for Virginia. Currently, the state is receiving about 105,000 vaccine doses per week from the federal government, according to Dr. Danny Avula, Virginia’s state vaccine coordinator. Each week, the state distributes vaccine allotments to health districts based on their population statistics. The larger the proportion of the state population, the more doses a health district gets.

“One thing that should be abundantly clear is that with 105,000 doses being distributed equitably by population across the state that leaves pretty small amounts for various communities,” Dr. Avula said in a telepress briefing last weekend. “We need to manage and temper expectations because with just several hundred or a couple thousand doses coming to each community there are not going to be that many slots for people to get vaccinated.”

The commonwealth is vaccinating just shy of 25,000 people per day according to the Virginia Department of Health. But as the state moves towards vaccinating people in the expansive 1B group, including seniors and essential workers, Dr. Avula said it will be challenging for health districts to keep up with demand. Last week, Dr. Avula said, the state received 300,000 requests for doses from vaccinators but received less than half that from the federal government.

Already the Rappahannock Rapidan Health District, which serves the counties of Culpeper, Fauquier, Madison, Orange and Rappahannock, has 25,000 people in line to schedule a vaccination appointment. But for the next month or two, the district will receive roughly 2,000 doses per week, according to Dr. April Achter, the district’s population health coordinator.

“We are working to allocate those equitably throughout the health district, using some at our central clinic and re-allocating some doses to our partners (hospitals and private clinics or pharmacies),” Achter wrote in an email.

REPORTING BUGABOOS

Virginia has had its fair share of challenges, not the least of which being its reporting of vaccination data. As of Wednesday, the Virginia Department of Health reports that 569,040 of the 1,156,500 distributed doses had been administered. If accurate, that would mean that only 49% of the commonwealth’s vaccine doses have made it into the arms of its residents.

That number, while low, is still higher than it was earlier in the week. On Monday the VDH’s vaccine dashboard showed that only 42% of vaccines had been administered, earning the commonwealth the second-to-last ranking in the country for vaccine delivery.

The significant jump from 42% to 49% this week can be mostly attributed to the team of 10 data trackers who were recruited this week to correct reporting errors and encourage vaccinators to report their numbers more promptly.

If the number of vaccines administered doesn’t improve, Dr. Avula said last week, then the federal government could reallocate Virginia’s earmarked shipment of doses to other states.

THE LOCAL IMPACT

Locally, Achter said that the RRHD is “administering and reporting our doses each week.” Throughout the district, 11,890 people have received at least one dose of the vaccine and 998 are fully vaccinated, having received the initial vaccine and the booster shot three to four weeks later.

In Rappahannock, at least 466 people have received the vaccine and 23 are fully inoculated against COVID-19. Essential workers (including teachers) and those over the age of 65 are now eligible to receive the vaccine, but the “severe shortage” of vaccines means that it may take a couple of months for everyone in the 1B category to get their appointment.

The Rappahannock County Schools have delayed returning to 4-day-a-week in-person learning until staff can receive their vaccines, with the expectation that the staff vaccination window will be completed by early March.

According to RCPS Superintendent Shannon Grimsley, more than 100 staff have registered to receive their vaccines. “I believe at last count we had only 10 employees say they could not schedule an appointment for the first dose through the RRHD system,” Grimsley said.

School Nurse Courtney Atkins told the Rappahannock News earlier this week that the schools have “been able to partner with Fauquier Health to obtain vaccine appointments for our staff members who were unable to get an appointment at the RRHD sites.”

If you are confused about how to get the COVID-19 vaccine, you are not alone. The best way to get in the queue to receive your vaccine is by visiting the Rappahannock Rapidan Health District website and completing the survey at the link provided. Business owners who employ essential workers can also fill out a survey on the RRHD website at https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/rappahannockrapidan/.