New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
More Yale New Haven Health staff vaccinated
Eight of 94 on list keep jobs by getting shots
NEW HAVEN — The number of employees in danger of losing their jobs in the Yale New Haven Health System continues to drop, with 86 staffers now either having been terminated or in the process, officials said Wednesday.
Dr. Ohm Deshpande, associate chief clinical officer, said during an online news briefing that of 94 employees who had not been vaccinated as of Monday, “eight of them actually got vaccinated at the last minute or submitted vaccination cards.”
He said as of Wednesday morning, 49 employees had been let go and 37 were in the process, though
“some of them may be getting vaccinated as well.” He said 0.2 percent of the health system’s more than 28,000 employees have not gotten vaccinated, “which is really, I think, a wonderful place to be. Obviously, we’re not happy when anyone leaves the organization when they’re valuable employees, but this is actually a pretty good story.”
Deshpande said anyone who has been terminated may return if they get vaccinated and “we’re happy to have them back.”
He said while there are just 51 COVID-19 patients in the system’s five hospitals, “our hospitals are more than full. Our clinical staffs are stressed beyond belief.” CEO Marna Borgstrom said 24 of the 51 patients were in intensive care and 18 of those were on ventilators.
She said 29 patients were in
Yale New Haven Hospital, six in Bridgeport Hospital, two in Greenwich Hospital and seven each in Lawrence and Memorial Hospital in New London and Westerly Hospital in Rhode Island.
Deshpande said the health system is only giving boosters for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, but “we expect that by the end of today there will be boosters approved for both Moderna and
J&J,” referring to Johnson & Johnson, “and it seems from the current reports that it is likely that there will be some version of permission given to mix and match vaccines, specifically giving mRNA vaccine to someone who got a J&J.”
Pfizer and Moderna are mRNA vaccines while Johnson & Johnson triggers the body to create antibodies by delivering part of the coronavirus DNA that creates the spike protein.
Deshpande said about 20 percent of employees eligible to receive the Pfizer booster have gotten it. “That’s not because of supply. That’s simply because of demand,” he said. “And I think we’re seeing that across the board that while there are folks that are very excited to get boosters, the response is not nearly the same as what we saw in the beginning of the year when we were all getting our initial vaccines.”
Deshpande said it’s possible that giving an mRNA booster to someone who received a J&J vaccine might give more protection. “But that’s been conjecture,” he said. “So we’ve really been waiting for some specific data, and over the last month or so some data has come to light. One in particular showed that the level of antibody response when someone who got the J&J vaccine initially got an mRNA vaccine was considerably higher than if they got another dose of the J&J vaccine.”
He said there are many caveats but “it does look like mixing mRNA vaccines with J&J is likely to be more effective, although the proof is in the pudding.”
Borgstrom said health system officials are concerned about staff shortages “but not because of COVID mandates. What we’re seeing is a supply problem.” Just as in other fields, “everybody has many open positions and many fewer people seeking interviews and jobs. So we’re concerned just like every other employer, but we do not believe that the mandate for vaccination has made that problem any more acute for us.”
Deshpande said the health system has experienced supply shortages in some areas, but
“from a PPE standpoint we are in good shape” by “being creative where we get them, stockpiling.”
Deshpande said Halloween trick-or-treating should be safe if children “stay outside. Don’t go inside. Avoid throngs of people crushed elbow to elbow. It’s a fairly low-risk activity.” He said plastic costume masks do not protect against the virus and it’s best to wear the proper surgical-type masks.
He said it is not clear how colder weather will affect the number of infections. “Initially we thought that it was just a slam dunk that when we are spending more time inside the infection rates will go up, and I think there’s some component to it,” he said.
“But the other weird thing that we’ve seen over the past 20 months is that … every two months there’s a peak and a valley, so I think it’s hard to say,” he said. “A lot of it depends on how prevalent is the virus in our community at that time. … I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that it’s going to be a particularly bad winter and it certainly will not be anything like we experienced in December and January of last year.”
Meanwhile, a study by the Yale School of Public Health has found that if everyone were either vaccinated or previously had a case of COVID, unvaccinated people could expect to be reinfected every 16 to 17 months.
Jeffrey Townsend, a professor of biostatistics and evolutionary biology, said it is too early in the pandemic to be able to know for sure how easily people can become reinfected, but said, if nothing more were done to vaccinate the population, “we would see reinfections on a year and a half sort of time scale, but ranging from three months to five years.”
In other words, someone could catch COVID a second time in three months and a third time in five years, he said. The time would vary just like it does for other viral illnesses.
Data from several common cold viruses, SARS and MERS were used to estimate the reinfection time. “We’re looking at the most closely related ones. They’re sisters basically,” Townsend said. He said the researchers compared “what we know about the waning antibodies with SARS-CoV-2 with what we know about reinfection with common cold coronaviruses” and others.
He said COVID’s reinfection rate appears to be “a little shorter” than the others. “It applies to people who have not been vaccinated,” Townsend said. However, those who have been vaccinated may become infected as time passes, as well.
“Time after time when we’ve made vaccines ... we’ve typically not been able to make a vaccine that has a different durability of immunity than natural infection,” Townsend said. “If our history of vaccine making has a lesson for us, we can expect infection following vaccination on similar time scales.”
He added that while evolutionary biology primarily looks at how things evolved, “this is a really nice example of an occasion where we were able to use evolutionary biology in an important way.”
The study was published in The Lancet Microbe on Oct. 1.