Some residents in vaccine priority groups still haven’t received a call
According to the latest numbers from the Virginia Department of Health, 2,768 Rappahannock County residents have received at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine. And that number could start to rise more rapidly now that the Rappahannock-Rapidan Health District (RRHD), which serves Culpeper, Fauquier, Orange, Madison and Rappahannock counties, has announced that anyone over the age of 16 is eligible to get a shot.
But that doesn’t quite mean that everyone in Phase 1 — folks over 65 and essential workers — has received a vaccine. Some county residents are scratching their heads about why they’ve been left behind.
Rappahannock County resident Louise Goddard, 72, told the News that though she registered with the health district in January, she still hasn’t gotten a call from the health district. In addition to being over 65, Goddard has underlying health conditions which she says put her at risk of severe COVID-19 disease.
“I was very confused about who I should be contacting and where I
should be checking,” she said, adding that she was beginning to wonder “who you have to ‘know’ in Rappahannock to get the vaccine.”
Frustrated, she asked a friend for advice, and the friend urged her to contact the RRHD.
So on Feb. 1, Goddard made the phone call. When she spoke with an administrator at the health district, Goddard said she was told there was no record of her registration.
The administrator helped Goddard re-enter her information. “She was wonderful,” Goddard said. “She told me I was definitely on the list.”
And then? Crickets.
Eager to be vaccinated, Goddard checked the CVS website at 5 a.m. on a Friday morning in March and found a pharmacy in Reston with open vaccine appointments. “So I drove to Reston,” she said. “But I just didn’t understand — in Rappahannock, it’s not like there are millions of people here. Why do we have to drive an hour and a half away?”
Goddard still hasn’t been called by the Virginia Department of Health. But April Achter, population health coordinator at the RRHD, said she believes experiences like Goddard’s are outliers.
“We’ve done our best to go through our list for that age group,” Achter said. “Occasionally for whatever reason we couldn’t reach someone by phone, sometimes they have a typo in their email address, different things have happened and we’re trying to catch all those people. … Sometimes the invites are going into [people’s] spam folders.”
Achter said that residents of the RRHD who qualify for a priority group and have not received a call from the health district should call the local health district at 540-316-6302 or send an email to askrrhd@vdh.virginia.gov.