(Seguin) — If you’re eager to get your COVID-19 vaccination, here’s something to help put the challenge into perspective for you. You could conceive a child today, deliver it, and actually have it be several weeks old before everyone in this community is actually vaccinated.
Health officials have been preaching patience for months, and Tuesday night Seguin Mayor Donna Dodgen says she believes it could take up to 45 weeks before the completion of this vaccination process.
Dodgen made her comments during Tuesday night’s meeting of the Seguin City Council. It was part of a COVID-19 update given by Seguin City Manager Steve Parker. Parker focused much of his attention on the city’s first mass vaccination clinic that continues this week at the Seguin Coliseum. Parker says the clinic is being jointly hosted by GRMC and Guadalupe County. On Tuesday night, he stated that they expected to administer 5,000 shots by the time the week is over.
“We are going to do a 1,000 doses the first day (Wednesday) and then we are going to ramp that up to 2,000 doses on Thursday and Friday. For your education, that’s about 30 doses every 15 minutes to do 1,000 doses in a day. The next day, we are going to have to double that and go to 60 doses just to be able to do that,” said Parker.
Parker says they have been preparing for this drive for weeks, so he thinks they are ready to handle this initial offering. He says this mass vaccination works in just getting started, and he knows they’ve got a long road ahead of them.
“It’s going to be a very long project for us. It’s going to take a lot of city resources. We do have a lot of city volunteers in house this time that is going to run this first one. We’ve got all the slots covered. It takes about 30 to 35 people to do one of these clinics and we have all those covered but as this goes forward, we are going to need help from the community to help with some of those things — just helping people with paperwork, getting people registered, imputing data into the system,” said Parker.
Parker says the hospital, the city and the county have all been working together to try to coordinate the clinics, and also coordinate the information that goes out to the public. He says resources are available online for each entity. He says it’s important for people to stay connected and informed. He says they expect more doses to continue to come in, but accessing that will mean that people will have to know when the online and phone registration periods open.
“We do have a city website homepage for vaccine related data. If you have questions, we have created a frequently asked questions brochure that people can ask questions to. We are trying to route all the county COVID questions into the county so we can have a call center that is going to answer those questions. That’s at COVID19@co.guadalupe.tx.us and then we also have a county hotline that is being manned by the county at this time. That was the call center that was overwhelmed (Tuesday) morning. They have about 40 lines with 100,000 probably close phone calls coming in,” said Parker.
Parker says they are working on new ways to try to alert people about the upcoming vaccination clinics, and he says they hope to someday have a way to make it easier for people to get registered.
“We do not have a mass vaccination sign-up list yet. I think I mentioned, last time, the problem with that is when you have 20,000 people and you have 5,000 slots, calling those people back and saying are ‘you available at noon on Tuesday or are you available on Wednesday at 4 p.m?’ And they are not there and they call you back. Keeping track of all that becomes a nightmare,” said Parker.
Parker says things overall worked well for this first sign-up period, but he says he knows it was a frustrating process for some, because there are people who were never able to access either the online portal or were able to get their phone calls answered on Tuesday. Parker says they will continue to work out those kinks, and meanwhile, start getting all of these available shots into the arms of people in the county.
“At this point, this system worked very good. The part is just we need more vaccines and that’s the message. We are just as frustrated as our citizens. We apologize for everybody that was on there (Tuesday) trying to get in and seeing it just spin and spin. But it was just an overload on the system when you have just that few vaccines versus the number of people moving in but it’s not from the lack of wanting people to get a vaccine shot. We just need more and we are going to put that to the test,” said Parker.
The only people who are eligible to receive the vaccines now are people who are over the age of 65, those who are over the age of 16 with chronic medical conditions, as well as healthcare workers and first responders. There are approximately 23,000 people who are over 65 in this county, and thousands more who would qualify because of an underlying condition. That’s part of the reason why officials say it will take months before the general population can start to get vaccinated, and then that will take even more months to complete. Officials say they know people are tired of dealing with the virus, but they say we all need to stay patient, because the vaccines will eventually be available for anyone who wants one. In the meantime, you’re encouraged to continue to wear a mask when you go out, practice social distancing whenever you can and wash your hands frequently.