Receiving the COVID-19 vaccine has been great news for the community this week, but the logistics of storing and administering the shots are trickier than you might think.
Lori Marshall, CEO of the Chatham-Kent Health Alliance, says security is tight.
“It does require some police escort to arrive to its destination, and then we also are not disclosing where we are putting the freezers (to store the vaccine) because we know this is a commodity that is in high demand.”
Despite the wait and uncertainty about when the vaccine would arrive, Marshall says the task force was ready to spring into action the moment the first delivery came.
“We’ve been talking for the last few weeks about the fact we’ve been planning, we’ve been working through things, doing dry runs, those sorts of things,” Marshall says. “Really the teams from public health and EMS were able to very quickly get out there. We had already worked with the homes on their consent forms for residents, so it was all that preparation in advance that meant that the moment it arrived, we could start.”
400 residents of long term care homes in the municipality have now received their first dose of the Moderna vaccine, and Marshall says Chatham-Kent’s second shipment is expected sometime next week.
For facilities like Wallaceburg’s Fairfield Park that are still dealing with active cases of COVID-19, Marshall says outbreaks have to be cleared by Public Health before inoculations can begin.