“So far, so good.”
That’s how local health officials describe the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine in Jackson County.
Dr. Eric Fish, president and chief executive officer of Schneck Medical Center in Seymour, reported Tuesday that 1,143 people in the county have received their first dose of the vaccine and 193 have been fully vaccinated by receiving both doses.
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“That’s good news,” Fish said during the hospital’s weekly community COVID update.
Fish said he received both doses of the vaccine with no issues.
To build on that positive news, Dr. Christopher Bunce, public health officer for the Jackson County Health Department, said the county’s next allotment of the vaccine from the Indiana State Department of Health should be significantly more than its first shipment.
On Tuesday, the county health department began administering the vaccine to the over 80 population.
“We have already scheduled out all of the vaccine that they gave us,” Bunce said. “The good news is that we have just been informed that our allotment is going to go up next week considerably, about four times what we got before.”
That means more people will be able to schedule their vaccinations to help move the process along, he added.
Karyn Fleetwood, executive director of Lutheran Community Home in Seymour, reported none of the residents at the facility have COVID.
“We are thrilled about that,” she said.
Several staff members are out on quarantine, however, due to community exposure to the virus over the holidays, she added.
LCH had its first COVID-19 vaccine clinic last week with 91% of residents receiving the vaccine.
“I’m a little disappointed with our staff members at 36%, so we’re doing a lot of education right now,” she said. “I really feel that a lot of the staff kind of took a wait-and-see approach for those of us who have gotten the vaccine to see if we had any issues.”
Fleetwood said she is hopeful a lot more of the staff sign up for upcoming clinics in February and March.
Like Fish, Fleetwood also has received both doses of the vaccine with no problems, she said.
A total of 9 million U.S. residents have received at least one dose of the vaccine so far.
“This does appear to be a very safe vaccine,” Bunce said. “Just by the sheer numbers, this is a huge amount of people being vaccinated, so adverse events are being followed very carefully. So far, there’s just no reason to believe that this is dangerous. There’s just no evidence to show that’s the case.”
Bunce said the health department doesn’t know how much vaccine it will receive very far into the future.
But the next group to be vaccinated will be residents age 70 to 80.
“We’re going to be going decade by decade down until the state tells us otherwise,” he said. “So it’s an age priority at this point.”
Fish said how the vaccine is administered and to whom it is given is “state driven.”
“The state will decide when we move down to 70 and 60 and so on,” he said.
Although the county’s seven-day COVID-19 positivity rate stands at about 16%, keeping Jackson County in the red or highest warning level for spread of the virus in the community, Bunce said he is optimistic.
“The change isn’t that great,” he said. “We’re still kind of anxiously feeling our way through that post-Christmas, New Year’s period. Hopefully, we won’t see the bump we were fearing.”
Schneck continues to average around eight to 10 patients admitted for COVID-19, Fish said.
On Tuesday, that number was up to 12 patients but “manageable,” he added.
The state announced Tuesday that 4,054 Jackson County residents have tested positive for COVID-19 since the pandemic began in March 2020, an increase of 12 from Monday’s total.
No new deaths attributed to COVID-19 were reported in Jackson County on Tuesday, meaning the death toll remains at 45.
There have been 37,427 tests administered to 15,882 individuals in Jackson County since March 18, an increase of 227 from Monday’s total.
The latest results were as of 11:59 p.m. Monday. The ISDH’s coronavirus dashboard is updated at noon daily.
On Tuesday, 3,191 additional Hoosiers across the state of Indiana were diagnosed with COVID-19 through testing at ISDH, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and private laboratories.
This brings to 570,477 the total number of Hoosiers known to have had the novel coronavirus following corrections to the previous day’s total.
For the state, a total of 6,175,128 tests have been administered, an increase of 34,338 from Tuesday’s total.
Indiana’s total number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 is 8,731 with 88 new deaths being reported Tuesday.