Vaccine hunt ‘anxiety-inducing’
San Antonio is only major Texas city that lacks an appointment system
Officials with two major COVID-19 vaccine providers in San Antonio say they aren’t convinced the city needs a one-stop sign-up portal for people trying to schedule vaccinations.
San Antonio is the only major Texas city without some form of a vaccine registry. Other major cities including Austin, Houston and Dallas have systems that allow residents to sign up and be notified later when an appointment becomes available.
The idea is to give people certainty they will be vaccinated at some point, rather than force them to battle jammed phone lines or try in vain to find open appointments online.
“To me, this is the definition of anxiety-inducing,” District 1 Councilman Roberto Treviño said Tuesday during a meeting of the City Council’s Community Health and Equity Committee.
But two medical executives told the committee they’re not sure a
registry would alleviate anxiety or help people secure appointments more easily — especially given the limited supply of vaccine.
“I don’t think any of us are opposed to a registry,” said Robert Leverence, chief medical officer of UT Health San Antonio. “I just don’t think we’re necessarily all convinced it’s going to solve the problem that we’re hoping to solve.”
Jimmie Keenan, a senior vice president at Wellmed Medical Management, echoed that point.
“If I’m number 680,000 on the list, I think I’m going to be a little anxious about when I’m going to get my vaccine,” Keenan said.
Push for a registry
For months, District 9 Councilman John Courage has pushed leaders of the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District to set up a registry.
As more doses become available and the pool of those eligible expands, it’s going to become even more difficult to schedule appointments, Courage said.
“That just makes it more and more challenging for people to get their shot,” Courage said in an interview. “It’s just more and more people fighting for the daily or weekly limited number of shots.”
One idea that emerged during the hearing piqued Courage’s interest.
Officials of University Health, Bexar County’s public hospital system, told the committee they can target for vaccination residents of neighborhoods with higher rates of heart disease and diabetes as well as lower COVID-19 vaccination rates. UH can use its mobile application to alert residents of those areas when appointments become available.
“As we open appointments two or three weeks in advance, this gives us that ability to give those folks ... a bit of a head start in signing up,” said Leni Kirkman, an executive vice president at University Health.
Courage suggested the city and county pony up funds to help the hospital system expand the targeted approach. Alternatively, the city could launch its own effort, he said.
Metro Health officials so far have resisted calls to set up a vaccine registry or waiting list.
Assistant City Manager Colleen Bridger, the city’s coronavirus czar, has maintained that a waiting list would do little to ease people’s anxiety over getting vaccinated.
Health officials and some City Council members also have questions about how the city would bring all vaccine providers into one system — especially given that vaccine distribution has become increasingly decentralized as pharmacies and grocery stores begin administering doses.
In a 7-4 vote in February, a majority of council members including Mayor Ron Nirenberg shot down a measure to create a one-stop registry. At the time, Nirenberg said there was no assurance that people who signed up would receive appointments within a reasonable time, given that the city cannot control its supply of vaccine.
Some won’t let go
But some elected officials aren’t ready to give up on the idea. Bexar County Commissioner Justin Rodriguez suggested that Metro Health and University Health create a joint list for their mass vaccination sites at the Alamodome and the Wonderland of the Americas mall.
“The alternative is we keep going at the rate we’re going now,” Rodriguez said in an interview. “And I just think the level of frustration is going to grow.”
Registries now in operation have their limitations. Residents who sign up in Harris and Dallas counties as well as in Austin still must manually make appointments when they become available.
Moreover, registries managed by the public health departments in Austin and Harris County don’t operate on a “first come, first served” basis. Rather, residents who sign up are selected randomly when appointments become available.
No registry in Texas appears to encompass both public and private providers. Austin’s system, for example, schedules appointments only for four vaccination sites run by the public health department, a spokesman said.
13 percent vaccinated
More than 369,000 Bexar County residents have gotten at least one dose of vaccine, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.
Some 207,000 residents are fully vaccinated — about 13 percent of Bexar residents over the age of 16.
The pandemic has been on the wane in the San Antonio region in recent weeks after the virus pushed hospitals to the brink in January. Health officials reported 192 cases of the virus Tuesday, bringing the total number of cases identified since last March to 201,010.
The seven-day average of new cases now stands at 174. During the winter surge, it sometimes exceeded 2,000.
Officials reported one more death from COVID-19 — a Hispanic woman in her 70s. The county’s fatality toll since the start of the pandemic is now 2,991.
The number of COVID-19 patients in Bexar County hospitals continued to decline Tuesday. Local hospitals were treating 206 coronavirus patients — compared with a record 1,520 patients on Jan. 18.
WASHINGTON — U.S. authorities encountered nearly double the number of children traveling alone across the Mexican border on Monday than on an average day last month, an official said Tuesday, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas conceded the surge was a challenge.
The Border Patrol came across 561 unaccompanied children at the border on Monday, including 280 in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, the official said, offering a snapshot of how quickly events at the border have changed during the first two months of Joe Biden’s presidency. By comparison, it encountered a daily average of 332 unaccompanied children in February, which itself was a 60 percent jump from January. The peak was 370 during a Trump-era surge in May 2019.
The U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Health and Human Services Department was moving to open two additional facilities to process children traveling alone — one for 800 children at Moffett Federal Airfield near San Francisco and another in Pecos, Texas. It is also looking to expand a facility in Donna, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley, to hold 2,000 people.
The Dallas Convention Center is scheduled to begin holding children as early as Wednesday with plans to accommodate up to 3,000. Another makeshift holding center in Midland, Texas, that opened last weekend
for 700 children had 485 on Monday.
Faced with criticism from all sides. Mayorkas said the situation was under control as he defended the administration’s policy of allowing children crossing by themselves to remain in
the country.
“They are vulnerable children, and we have ended the prior administration’s practice of expelling them,” Mayorkas said.
The increasing number of migrants attempting to cross the border, which is on pace to hit a 20-year peak, has become an early test for Biden as he seeks to break from his immediate predecessor, President Donald Trump, who waged a broad effort to significantly curtail both legal and illegal immigration.
Republicans in Congress have claimed that Biden’s support for immigration legislation and decision to allow people to make legal asylum claims has become a magnet for migrants.
Some progressive Democrats and others, meanwhile, have assailed the Biden administration for holding migrant children in U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facilities longer than the allowed 72 hours as it struggles to find space in shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services.
The overall increase is blamed on a number of factors, including the economic upheaval caused by the pandemic in Central America and two hurricanes that battered the region. U.S. officials have also conceded that smugglers have likely encouraged people to try to cross under the new administration.
Migrants who are under 18 years old are being allowed to remain in the country while the government decides whether they have a legal claim to residency, either under asylum law or for some other reason.
The U.S. is continuing to expel most single adults and families either to Mexico or to their home countries.
“The situation we are currently facing at the Southwest border is a difficult one,” Mayorkas said. “We are tackling it.”