Brainstorming the vaccine rollout
Danbury-area towns face challenges, look to state for guidance as they inoculate residents
As towns across Connecticut wait for vaccine doses to arrive each week, they also look to the state for guidance on next steps. The majority of town officials are still laser-focused on vaccinating residents 75 and older from phase 1b before moving on to think about future phases.
Yet, with one round of signups under their belts, a few towns in the Danbury area have begun to plan for the next rollouts.
As of Feb. 4, a handful of towns have inoculated to more than two-thirds of their residents ages 75 and up, including Ridgefield, Wilton, Sherman, and Roxbury. Several more have hit more than half: Brookfield, Bridgewater, New Fairfield, Redding, New Milford.
Despite the immense task of getting older adults signed up on the Vaccine Administration Management System, town officials said they would continue to use the system unless otherwise notified by the state. But several towns still got creative with their vaccine signups to try to help the process run more smoothly — creating internal registration forms to expedite the process, filming videos, launching phone-a-friend campaigns,
As of Feb. 4, a handful of towns have inoculated more than two-thirds of their residents ages 75 and up, including Ridgefield, Wilton, Sherman, and Roxbury.
hiring more people to do outreach with VAMS, and calling residents to remind them of appointments.
Connecticut has been able to secure a roughly 17 percent increase in its weekly vaccine doses from the federal government, according to the Associated Press. So, the next few weeks should see vaccination numbers increase, especially as more private companies and corporations like CVS and Walgreens begin to administer the vaccine.
But what happens next, and when will it happen? That’s for the state to decide.
“Everything we’re doing is dictated by the state of Connecticut,” said Laura Cordeira, director of community health and wellness at RVNAhealth, formerly known as the Ridgefield Visiting Nurse Association. “We keep looking to the state to see if they’re going to give us a better alternative to VAMS.”
So far, the system for signing up to get vaccinated has had “definite hiccups” with a lot of challenges, Cordeira said. It has been updated slightly since December, but Cordeira said it’s still exclusionary. Not only is the program difficult for many to navigate, but the site is only in English.
Spanish speakers have the option to call 211, a help line, to navigate through, but if you don’t speak English or Spanish, there are few alternatives.
“Anyone who is not an English speaker is going to have a hard time,” she said. “We look forward to there being an easier process to get people engaged in this.”
As of now, no alternatives are being offered for current or future phases.
RVNA is awaiting state guidance for administration of vaccines to homebound
residents, and have yet to hear anything.
On the ground
From vaccine signups, to doses per week, to moving on to new phases of rollout, the state government dictates all. Towns have had to devise their own ways of dealing with a difficult federal registration system.
“Everybody thinks that’s up to us and that’s not up to us,” Danbury Mayor Joe Cavo said of moving to the next vaccine phases. “We just await their instructions.”
The Danbury Health Department is working with United Way, the Senior Center and the Age Well Community Council to help seniors book appointments through VAMS and find transportation to the clinic. As of Tuesday, the Health Department had vaccinated just under 2,400 people.
Cavo does not expect to change methods for future phases, unless the state develops a new protocol.
Thus far, New Milford has had success with its use of an advance application process, where eligible residents signup online before their information is put into VAMS. Mayor Pete Bass said this helps catch seniors who signup as a couple or share an
email address. So far, he said they have about 3,700 who have applied through the town website.
Bass said the town may continue to use this kind of pre-application in new phases, but they’re still looking at a “wide swath of options.” If the next phase includes a large number of people, Bass said that may overwhelm the process. For now, they’re going to wait and see.
Ridgefield and Wilton have online walk-through videos for VAMS, and Newtown has bypassed some issues by having residents input information through a link on the town website, which the town funnels into the federal system. Newtown had its first clinic over the weekend and plans to scale operations to handle the newly eligible groups, First Selectman Dan Rosenthal said.
“It’s been an all-hands-ondeck process,” he said. “We’re running these clinics with an eye on how we will scale.”
In Sherman where the share of vaccinated residents age 75 and up is about twothirds, First Selectman Don Lowe said they’re going to wait for directives from the state.
“Right now, I don’t know any other way around that,”
Lowe said. “I don’t really think there’s an opportunity to freelance here right now.”
Sherman’s relatively small population has used VAMS to schedule appointments, with many residents heading to Kent and a shared clinic in New Fairfield for their doses. The town has been helping people register online.
In Brookfield, local officials have a committee to plan for next phases. So far, the only significant change they’ve discussed is a move to a larger facility that would accommodate more people — potentially St. Joseph School. The town has the volunteer capacity, now they’re just waiting for more doses, said Maureen Farrell, Brookfield’s volunteer coordinator.
When the age 65-and-up crowd is approved for vaccination, they will most likely still go to the Brookfield Senior Center, where residents are receiving inoculations, Farrell said. The town plans to continue encouraging people to ask for help if they run into issues on VAMS.
“Once an appointment is scheduled, it goes very well,” Farrell said.
As those who are eligible for the vaccine get younger, she expects them to be able to handle the website better.
“As this progresses, you’re going to see it getting better and better and better,” said Danbury’s Joe Cavo.
But RVNAhealth’s Laura Cordeira would disagree. While towns have had some success with their VAMS campaigns and outreach efforts, she thinks the system will continue to present problems, even for the computer literate. And those with more resources and computer literacy skills will be better able to schedule appointments, creating an unequal system.
“What we’re going to see, probably, is an inequity,” Cordeira said.