Pierce County works to improve COVID vaccine access as wider eligibility looms
Amid recent federal and state announcements of accelerated timelines for COVID-19 vaccinations and reopening the economy and schools, Pierce County is continuing to adapt its own systems to keep up.
Adding call center access for those without computers, improving the technical side of registering and sending information to the state, and improving the flow through the mass vaccination clinics have all been ongoing works of progress.
According to Kayla Scrivner, immunization branch director for the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department: “We’re adding more and more staff to that call center and have been capturing and tracking that ... And through social media, if people reach out to us, we make sure they know about future events, or if they’ve had trouble registering, we circle back.
“We understand that this is a service, and we’re trying to provide the best service that we can to our community and get them connected to vaccine and take their feedback and make improvements on our processes.”
The county has come a long way from its first mass COVID-19 vaccine event at Clover Park Technical College in late January.
“We didn’t know that people were going to be as anxious as they were,” recalled Scrivner. “And we had a whole bunch of people come early, not at their appointment time, because they were so excited. And so we had a little bit of a traffic issue.”
That “traffic issue” resulted in hours of waiting for participants and few if any breaks for workers.
Fast forward to March, and the county is running multiple streamlined events each week, with more than 30,000 doses administered the first week of the month. The next week, 4,000 were set to be vaccinated at a two-day Tacoma Dome event March 10-11.
Scrivner says each event has led to further refinements, such as improved traffic flow.
“We’re all about process improvement. So we find we learn things when we do an event, and then it’s always different, you know, you’re going to these different locations, and there’s different tweaks that you need to make for each one,” she said.
During a national address Thursday evening, President Joe Biden called on states to make all adults eligible for the vaccine by May 1.
It’s going to take more vaccines and more vaccine administrators to accomplish the dream of backyard barbecues by July 4th, another Biden benchmark announced in the same address.
“So, in the projected allocations that I’ve seen, I don’t know that there is supposed to be enough vaccine by May 1 for everyone,” Scrivner noted, echoing Biden’s warning that there likely would not be enough vaccine distributed by that time.
When the boost in vaccines comes, Scrivner said, the mass clinics can adapt.
“All of our events are scalable, so if we can get the big enough footprint of a location, we add more lanes, and then we increase the throughput. So, especially for the (Puyallup) fairgrounds, we can add more lanes there and increase the size of our events,” she said.
She predicted the county will see more pop-up clinics as well as repeat vaccine events at large venue locations such as Cheney Stadium, a site now used for COVID testing.
Biden on Thursday also expanded the number of qualified professionals who can administer shots to include dentists, EMTs and paramedics, midwives, optometrists, podiatrists, respiratory therapists and veterinarians, as well as medical students, nursing students and other health care students. The federal government will launch a website to help individuals determine whether they are eligible to sign up to volunteer to administer shots.
Starting March 17, the next group of people in Washington state’s Phase 1 Tier 1B are up for vaccination: workers in agriculture, food processing, grocery stores, public transit, firefighters and law enforcement, among others. The next tier also includes people over the age of 16 who are pregnant or have a disability that puts them at high-risk.
Educators and childcare workers became eligible March 2.
All of this adds thousands of newly eligible recipients, still outpacing available vaccines for weeks to come.
REGISTRATION CHANGES
Those seeking to be vaccinated in Piece County have long struggled to get appointments, with technical issues, trouble finding locations and a lag in up-to-date appointment slots.
Pierce County Emergency Management purchased a registration platform to track participants, according to Mike Halliday, public information specialist with Pierce County Department of Emergency Management.
Once it is integrated, the required information for the state Department of Health will be sent immediately to the Washington State Immunization Information System, a lifetime registry that tracks immunization records.
“That feature will go live in the next seven to 14 days,” he said.
In other improvements, Halliday added: “The department is in the process of standing up a call center for people needing help registering. We are also mapping service providers near vaccination sites so we can offer shots with any left-over doses at the end of the clinics.”
Scrivner said the state has been working on a new registration platform as well. It will work like Expedia and other travel sites. The site will update appointment slots in real time.
A check of the state’s vaccine locator site Friday showed some appointment slots listed were last updated within minutes or hours, others within days.
Scrivner said the new registration should help everyone regardless of insurance and pull information from providers.
“Every provider that gets vaccine has to report every day, into a system that says how much vaccine they have, how much they’ve used, and how many doses they still have available,” she said. “They’re working with some tech companies to wrap that up into a system that will be easy to interface with on the user end as well.”
BY THE NUMBERS
Pierce County’s goal is to vaccinate 350,000 people “to complement efforts by health care providers, pharmacies and public health to serve the total population,” according to Halliday.
“Pierce County Emergency Management would scale the mass vaccine operation to the level of vaccine available. If substantially more was available, the county would increase staffing, enhance logistical support and operate more weekly sites to meet the goal and keep our county safe,” he said.
The health department on its dashboard says more than 15 percent of Pierce County residents have received their first dose, with more than 8 percent now fully vaccinated. Statewide, more than 18 percent of the population has initiated vaccination, with 10.26 percent now fully vaccinated.
The state says it is now ahead of its goal of giving 45,000 vaccines a day, with the current seven-day average at 46,119.
The question on Gov. Jay Inslee’s mind, when visiting a recent mass vaccine event at the fairgrounds in Puyallup, was how much more they could do.
“We’re trying to assess how much more we can build up capacity because we are going to have more doses,” he told volunteers at the site.
The state’s allocations announced by the state Department of Health for the following weeks show incremental increases:
▪ Week of March 14: 327,320 total doses (170,680 first doses, 156,640 second doses)
▪ Week of March 21: 334,340 total doses (170,680 first doses, 163,660 second doses)
▪ Week of March 28: 341,360 total doses (170,680 first doses, 170,680 second doses)
The health department’s data dashboard says that so far, 218,382 doses have been administered to Pierce County residents. That includes first and second doses of the Pfizer/Moderna vaccines, with 77,552 residents fully vaccinated so far of the county’s 904,980 population.
Virginia Mason Franciscan Health on its website says it has administered 139,023 doses systemwide as of March 11, which extends beyond Pierce County. MultiCare has administered 105,310 doses, also as of March 11.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Here are ways to find vaccine appointments if you are in the qualifying phase/tier:
▪ To be added to waitlist or for more information on finding vaccine appointments, contact the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, 253-649-1412. You can also go online to see other available vaccine sites at tpchd.org/vaxtothefuture. You can sign up for future notifications of events at tpchd.org/notify. The health department does not send direct registration links to subscribers of this list; it is only for advance notifications.
▪ To be added to MultiCare waitlist, call its automated vaccine line at 833-770-0530.
▪ Virginia Mason Franciscan Health’s call center: 253-792-2385. Only call if you currently qualify for the vaccine as the center receives a high volume of calls. You can also register online: https://www.chifranciscan.org/patients-and-visitors/covid-19/vaccine-information/how-to-schedule
▪ State Department of Health: findyourphasewa.org. If you don’t have computer access, call 800-525-0127 and press #, and someone will help you over the phone.
