By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
After two months of mass clinics in Newport and Lincoln City, the COVID-19 vaccine came to Waldport on Thursday.
Some 215 south Lincoln County residents got their first dose of the Moderna vaccine at the first of planned weekly clinic, shuttled through in groups of 6-7 every 10 minutes at the Waldport Community Center.
“It was convenient and easy,” said Mike Presser of Waldport as he left Thursday. Presser was in the first group vaccinated; his wife, Bonnie, came through later in the afternoon.
The clinic was open from noon to 7 p.m., later than clinics elsewhere in the county.
The Waldport clinic was staffed by volunteers, some county employees excused from their regular jobs, and paramedics from Pacific West Ambulance.
PacWest crews had vaccinated first responders at the Newport Fire Department and at several assisted living centers, said supervisor Jeff Mathia, “but this is the first mass clinic where we’ve had hundreds come in.”
As with other clinics, people were happy and eager – but occasionally nervous – to get their first dose.
“This is very convenient,” said Bill Chown of Waldport, who was vaccinated along with his wife, Bron. “We were eligible two weeks ago but couldn’t get an appointment. This (clinic) popped up and we took it.”
Lincoln County Public Health has been organizing clinics in Newport, while North Lincoln Fire & Rescue has been operating one in Lincoln City. Samaritan Health Services offers first-dose clinics Friday and Saturday mornings at its Newport hospital, and the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz has opened its clinic to non-tribal members.
But Thursday’s clinic was the first in south county, as health providers race through a constantly changing waiting list. All told, the county, its health partners and pharmacies had 2,812 first doses available to residents this week.
As of Monday, 14,993 Lincoln County residents had received their first (8,253) or second (6,740) vaccine doses — or 53.5 percent of the 28,000 adults the county expects to want vaccine. That is the third highest vaccination rate of any county in Oregon.
Because of that, Lincoln County was authorized by the state this week to offer vaccines to adults over 44 with underlying health conditions, people in subsidized housing, people displaced by wildfires and seafood processing workers.
But the county is also finding it needs to adjust its clinic schedules. The latest group to become eligible includes younger, working people who find it more difficult to make it to mid-day clinics.
As a result, there were 66 unfilled appointments in Newport on Thursday and 10 in Waldport, said Susan Trachsel, spokeswoman for Lincoln County Public Health.
“We have new groups with more working people in them,” said Trachsel. “We’re going to have to adjust the schedule so we can catch these people.”
To help with that, the county will split the hours of its Wednesday clinic in Newport to offer appointments from 8 a.m. to noon and then 3-7 p.m. The next clinic in Waldport will be Saturday, April 3.
On Thursday, LCPH it is setting up a clinic on the Newport bayfront to vaccinate workers in the seafood processing plants, where a massive outbreak there last June ended up sweeping through much of the county. The county is also going to Otis on April 3 to vaccinate newly-eligible wildfire victims there.
Both clinics will draw from an allocation of 700 one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccines the county is being given by the OHA next week. It is only the state’s second Johnson & Johnson allocation since an initial delivery in early March.
County moving fast through list
If Lincoln County continues to move ahead quickly with its vaccination clinics, there is a chance – with state permission – it could begin inoculating others ahead of schedule. The next eligibility date is April 19 when frontline workers as defined by the federal government, multigenerational household members, and, adults 16-44 with underlying health conditions become eligible. On May 1, all Oregonians 16 and older become eligible.
As late as January, state officials were forecasting that it would take into autumn or beyond to offer vaccination to the 3.2 million eligible adults. In pushing up eligible groups late last week, Gov. Kate Brown said the timeline is now much shorter.
“This doesn’t mean that every Oregonian will be able to get a shot right away,” Brown said. “We expect to have enough doses for every Oregonian who wants a vaccine to have the opportunity for at least a first dose by the end of May.”
Brown ordered a compression of the state’s priority list after President Joe Biden directed states to remove all limits on vaccine eligibility by May 1 — two months earlier than Oregon had planned.
Lincoln County was one of 20 counties sending a written statement to the Oregon Health Authority attesting they have “largely” vaccinated residents over 65 and had the staff, volunteers and clinics to handle moving on to the next group. Statewide, the OHA said 58 percent of people 65 and over had been vaccinated by the end of last week.
Trachsel said the county has seen only a small amount of resistance to people voluntarily getting the vaccine. That is unlike Douglas County, where hundreds of vaccine appointments are going unfilled, or in Coos County where the high rate of COVID-19 cases continue to keep that area in the state’s “extreme risk” category and businesses and social activities mostly shut down.
That certainly wasn’t the case Thursday with Bill and Bron Chown.
The couple said they had drastically limited their activities the past year, only venturing into public areas for essential services. They missed being able to travel this winter and hope to take a road trip – no airplanes for awhile — once both get their second vaccines.
“There’s lots of places we can drive to that we haven’t been to yet,” said Bill Chown.
“We also haven’t been out to dine since March a year ago,” he said. “My birthday is in July, so I’d like to go out to dinner on my birthday.”