Seattle FD paramedic visits and sells vaccines at adult care facility

David Gutman
Seattle Times

Seattle — The Mayor of Seattle announced on Thursday that the Seattle Fire Department will begin vaccination of residents of adult family homes in the city after the city was approved as a distributor of the COVID-19 vaccine late last week.

Darkan has assembled a new impetus as the first of a major city effort to distribute vaccines from locations throughout the city.

“We have to put these shots out of the fridge into people’s arms,” ​​she said. “If we have a stable supply, we hope to launch a mass vaccination site alongside the test site.”

According to city officials, the city has been running four free drive-up coronavirus testing sites for several months, conducting more than 556,000 tests.

Darkan said the city had discussed with Seattle Public Schools the possibility of using school facilities to set up vaccination sites.

“It would have to be a really full-scale approach,” she said, and King County needs to vaccinate 1.3 million people and give 2.6 million shots to reach 70% of the adult population. Emphasized. “It’s not this scale, it’s a business that Japan has never done before.”

In this first step, fire department rescue personnel make a door-to-door visit to an adult family home that is not subject to a federal partnership with CVS and Walgreens. According to Fire Chief Harold Skoggins, there are about 100 such facilities in the city, each with about 8-10 residents and staff.

Adult family homes serve both the elderly and the disabled in a residential environment. According to the State Department of Social Health Services (DSHS), Washington has more than 3,300 adult family homes and King County has more than 1,200 homes, but CVS and Walgreens can serve more homes. Unknown.

In Seattle, according to DSHS, nine adult family homes currently report at least one COVID case among residents or staff, and 22 other homes have had cases since the onset of the pandemic.

Officials said the Seattle fire would vaccinate both residential residents and workers.

According to Scoggins, two mobile vaccination teams will be used, each with one EMS technician or paramedic handing out shots, and two other staff members confirming their identities and the state’s vaccine tracking system. Gather information about.

The city has requested 1,000 initial shipments of the Moderna vaccine, which will be distributed within two weeks.

Seattle Fire plans to complete the first vaccination by January 24th and the second vaccination by February 21st.

Since vaccination in mid-December, the state has struggled to quickly vaccinate the most vulnerable people: caregivers and health care workers. CVS and Walgreens, which have contracts to set up a vaccine clinic in a long-term care facility, failed to schedule a vaccine clinic after waiting a few weeks for state approval.

The Washington State Department of Health approved Seattle Fire as a vaccine distributor on Saturday.

But that was a long process. The city had to take several steps, including first applying for approval in late November and proving that the vaccine could be properly stored (in a freezing freezer) and processed, Skoggins said.

Republican Congressman Joe Schmic said last week that the Ministry of Health said about 2,000 healthcare providers were awaiting approval as vaccine distributors and raised staffing issues for untreated portion.

The Department of State did not answer questions about provider approval and backlog.

Washington is currently in the early stages of vaccine distribution, with priority given to healthcare professionals, first-time responders, and caregiver residents. The next step in vaccination goes to people over the age of 70 and people over the age of 50 living in multigenerational households.

The state is responsible for determining vaccine eligibility criteria.

Darkan said he was dissatisfied with the slow pace of vaccine distribution, but said the whole world was on the same vessel.

She compared it to the city’s struggle to secure sufficient coronavirus testing data last spring and called it “déjà vu again.”

“We finally got a vaccine that could give us hope,” Darkan said. “We will really rely on the federal government to provide a stable source of information.”

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