Pierce County seeks more COVID-19 vaccines in battle to get back to Phase 3
The county executive on Monday said he’s seeking more vaccines to help Pierce County get back on track with the state’s pace of COVID-19 vaccinations and to help get the county back into Phase 3.
The roll back to Phase 2 of the state “Roadmap to Recovery Plan,” announced Monday, will constrict businesses such as restaurants, retailers and gyms to 25 percent capacity down from 50 percent, among other rules.
Pierce County Executive Bruce Dammeier told The News Tribune he is frustrated because the return to Phase 2 won’t help those most adversely affected by the coronavirus.
“The vast majority of people who are seniors who are vulnerable to really bad outcomes are vaccinated,” he said.
Issues behind Pierce County’s rising caseloads, he contends, are not adequately addressed with the Roadmap metrics.
Dammeier blamed vaccines Pierce County was shorted by a “technical glitch,” the higher rates of comorbidities among residents, and a change in hospital rates.
Dammeier is requesting the state send an additional 15,000 vaccine doses weekly, until the county reaches about 55,000 extra doses, to catch-up to the state vaccination rate.
He believes the additional doses would help lower the case rates and hospitalization rates of the coronavirus to Phase 3 standards. Once injected, the 55,000 COVID-19 doses would also pull Pierce County to the state average in vaccination rates.
He also wants to open up eligibility to more people sooner than the state’s April 15 date when eligibility opens to all adults 16 and over without qualifying conditions.
“We want to get as many people vaccinated as quickly as possible,” he told The News Tribune in a phone interview Monday.
Vaccines
Pierce County’s vaccination rate continues to lag the state and most all neighboring counties.
The state Department of Health’s COVID dashboard on Monday showed the state’s rate at 32.68 percent who initiated vaccination, with 20.85 percent fully vaccinated.
That compared with Pierce County’s posted rate of 26.42 percent initiating vaccination, and 17.29 percent fully vaccinated.
King County was at 36.38 percent initiating vaccination, and 21.58 percent fully vaccinated.
Asked whether Pierce County could handle a boost of distributing 15,000 more vaccines a week, Jody Ferguson, director of Pierce County’s Department of Emergency Management told The News Tribune via email:
“Pierce County Emergency Management has vaccinated more than 50,000 people since late January. The department has scaled its effort as interest in vaccines and the availability of doses has increased. Emergency Management’s current plans include delivering 15,000 doses per week should more vaccines become available countywide. The department’s model is designed to grow as more vaccine comes into the county for distribution.”
Some health officials have argued that the shortfall, which officials have not disclosed in specific numbers, would have made a difference in the latest metrics.
“We’re not talking 10’s of 1,000s of vaccines right now, which may have made a difference,” Stephanie Dunkel, TPCHD’s assistant division director for Communicable Disease, told The News Tribune last week after the shortfall was addressed during the Board of Health meeting.
“So mask mandates and isolation and quarantine and investigations work that we’re doing are still effective tools, and tools we need to continue going. With the balance of the vaccine and those tools, we’re still definitely in that phase where we need to be doing all of the above.”
Secretary of Health Dr. Umair Shah, in a statement issued Monday afternoon after the metrics announcement, said the state still does not have enough vaccines to eliminate the virus.
“We need to focus on lowering disease transmission for the next several months, even though we have increased immunity across the state due to vaccination efforts,” he said.
“Vaccine is a crucial tool, but it isn’t the only tool, and we don’t have enough yet to rely on it to shore up the virus and keep the majority of us safe from the spread of disease. We’ve administered more than four million vaccines to people in Washington so far, and more than 20% of our state population is fully vaccinated. We’ll keep up this important work of getting people vaccinated, with the goal of reaching a more robust level of community immunity.”
Health
Pierce County showed 267.9 new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 over two weeks, during the most recent state data. Phase 3 requires counties have fewer than 200 new cases per 100,000 over a 14-day span.
Asked why Pierce County is struggling to meet metrics, Dammeier said the county is doing its best to understand that, but the county’s collective health is a contributing factor.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said medical conditions like diabetes, obesity and smoking put people at higher risk for severe illness and fatalities from COVID-19.
Pierce is ranked 19th of Washington’s 39 counties, according to County Health Rankings by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin’s Population Health Institute.
Adult obesity in Pierce County is 32 percent, higher than the state’s average of 29 percent and the national average of 30 percent.
Pierce County falls in the middle of Washington’s counties in diabetes prevalence, the county rankings data said. About 10 percent of the county’s population is reported to have diabetes. Wahkiakum County has the highest reported diabetes prevalence with 15 percent.
The prevalence of human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, in Pierce County is second to King County with 203 diagnoses per 100,000 population.
The county falls in line with the national average of adult smokers with 15 percent.
At Wednesday’s Board of Health meeting, Nigel Turner, director of the communicable disease division of the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department, addressed the hospitalization rate for Pierce County:
“... it does reflect we tend to have a higher rate of hospitalizations for many types of preventable conditions in Pierce County. It reflects many of the conditions that we know we need to work on in terms of public health. And I think part of addressing this long term is to address those issues as well.”
The health department’s director of Health Dr. Anthony Chen agreed with Turner at the meeting.
“So, there are factors here in Pierce County that are not present in some other counties that contribute to these rates of chronic disease rates of smoking, access to health care services,” Chen said. “Those are just other things which continue to show that COVID-19 is really just magnifying all the challenges that we had before, whether it’s the inequities or the magnitude of the illnesses. That’s why it’s so important that we continue to work on all those other issues.”
Hospital rates
State guidelines require counties to have fewer than five new hospitalizations per 100,000 over one week to remain in Phase 3.
Pierce County had 6.4 new hospitalizations per 100,000 during March 24-30, according to the state Department of Health.
Dammeier said Virginia Mason Franciscan Health and MultiCare, the two top health care providers in the county, have told him they have “ample capacity to handle everyone who needs hospitalization for COVID.”
He said Pierce County would be fine if the state kept the hospital metric at ICU capacity rather than hospitalizations, or hospital admissions for COVID-19.
“Right now, our hospital systems are at about half of what they were in December for anyone sick with COVID,” Dammeier said.
Department of Health said staff continue to measure ICU bed occupancy. The statewide ICU bed occupancy is 77.8 percent, according to the most recent data from March 29 to April 4.
“This is assessed statewide and is a circuit breaker measure that would roll all counties back one phase if not met,” spokesperson Ginny Streeter said in an email.
Hospitalizations measure the burden and trajectory of severe COVID-19 disease, Streeter said.
“In addition, it tells us about the combined impacts of access to healthcare and the severity of illness in a community,” she said.
A “hospital admission” is an individual with positive COVID-19 infection at the time of their admission to the hospital, according to state DOH on its COVID dashboard. The “ICU occupancy” is the number of staffed adult ICU beds occupied in acute care, which includes all patients in the ICU, not just patients with COVID-19.
Additionally, DOH considers the the “admission location” is the location of the hospital, not the individual’s residence.
Virginia Mason Franciscan Health officials told The News Tribune that its current COVID hospitalizations are around half of what they were in December.
MultiCare, in an emailed statement in response to questions, told The News Tribune it continued to “have the capacity to deliver the care that our community needs.”
“All of our hospitals have plans to address a surge in hospitalizations, and we can expand or contract our COVID-19 units to serve the community need at the time — just as we have done throughout the pandemic. Right now, we are seeing fairly stable inpatient COVID-19 case numbers in our hospitals and fewer COVID-19 cases that we saw last December. We are always attuned to our modeling and projections to ensure we are fully prepared for any changing situation.”
This story was originally published April 13, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
