Everything I’ve learned about COVID vaccination in Arizona
There are a lot of moving parts.
For over a week, I’ve been making regular Twitter updates, attempting to piece together the best statewide Arizona COVID vaccine count. This was born out of frustration from not being able to find a statewide tally. I figured there were other people who shared the same frustration so I started publishing my numbers.
Pima and Maricopa have been posting regular updates on the number of vaccine doses administered on their respective website dashboards. Sadly, no other county in the state is doing so, and for any other county I’ve had to use social media and news reports to supplement the official count.
I figured I would collect all the information I’ve learned as a result of this and put it into a writeup.
How are vaccines being distributed?
Vaccine distribution varies by county. Maricopa County has partnered with area hospitals, and is using what they call PODs (Point Of Distributions). These are centralized areas where—you guessed it—they distribute the vaccine.
People drive up in their car, their shot is administered. They wait around for 15 minutes—a cautionary measure against the rare allergic reaction—then they are free to leave.
As of last week, vaccinations have begun of staff and resident long-term care facilities across the state. These vaccinations are being carried out by Walgreens and CVS at the behest of the Federal Government. Pima County says these doses are not included in their official count, and this is likely the case across the state.
The most common way of distributing vaccines outside of Maricopa seems to be the respective counties hand off the doses to partnered regional hospitals and health centers which then administer the doses.
How are shots being counted?
Per AZDHS’s Covid Vaccine Draft Plan, the state uses the Arizona State Immunization Information System (ASIIS). ASIIS is a registry used normally to monitor the immunization of children in the state. With the Covid vaccine plan, local health agencies must report information about the vaccinations they performed to AZDHS.
With this system in place, AZDHS should have the most comprehensive count of how many vaccines have been administered where. The state is promising to have a vaccine dashboard online soon and has been releasing updates to the press intermittently.
That said, I am fairly concerned that some counties may not be doing a great job tracking vaccinations given how hard it has been to get numbers from them.
When I emailed several counties in an attempt to get more complete counts, I only got one response, and I am not terribly encouraged by it. Coconino County told me they did not have the number of doses administered by their partners.
What’s taking so long?
Here’s the general vaccine situation in the United States: States have received allotments of vaccines from the Federal government. The current allotments are too small to vaccinate more than a fraction of the population, and we need more vaccines produced and distributed to states.
There’s a more immediate problem: states are struggling to distribute the vaccines they’ve been allocated already in a timely manner.
Arizona is no exception. By the last official count, we have only administered around a quarter of the doses the state has received so far. So what’s causing this bottlenecking?
Reporting by NBC suggests the health departments of the state and counties are understaffed and underfunded. In some cases, skepticism of the vaccine caused some folks in the 1A group to forego vaccination. The article mentions a case of a fire station where half the firefighters refused to be vaccinated. Anecdotally, I have heard of nurses refusing to to take the vaccine.
A buggy vaccine management system caused resulted in slowdowns in Maricopa County, according to reporting by KJZZ. Confusion over location and scheduling has delayed healthcare workers from getting shots.
Nurses are also understandably fatigued and overworked and Maricopa is distributing shots at PODs instead of hospitals, unlike other counties. This means nurses may have to travel some distance during their off hours to receive the vaccine.
Another clear problem has been the start of vaccination coinciding with the holiday season. This resulted in days where counties were not even performing vaccinations. Then, this weekend, there were only two PODs open on Saturday and just one on Sunday.
To me this seems to really undercut the seriousness of this virus and costs valuable time, the virus is not taking holidays or the weekend off.
This photo from the only POD open Sunday shows what appears to be no wait for shots. This would point to an issue with scheduling and prioritization rather than a staffing issue, although it’s possible to have both.
It’s time for total mobilization
Our current rate of vaccinations is inadequate. We have been allocated enough vaccines to administer a single dose to 4% of the state. We have only managed to do a quarter of that.
COVID’s human cost has been severe enough already and will continue to worsen. Arizona hospitalizations are at their highest point. The economic damage the virus has caused will continue until it is brought to heel.
We have a vaccine now. The Federal response to this crisis has been subpar at every turn, and production and allocation of the vaccine is something that will need to be dealt with at the national level of government.
That being said, we should not allow state leadership to escape responsibility for what they can control here: getting shots into arms. The state should spare no expense, you cannot spend too much money on ending the pandemic.
Allocate more funding to staffing up and expanding vaccinations sites. Reconsider how prioritization is done if it creates administrative burdens that prevent shots from getting into arms. Provide frequent, easily accessible, and transparent data about how many shots are being distributed and where so the public can track progress.
