The distribution of COVID-19 vaccines to front-line health care workers in Connecticut could begin as early as this weekend, state health officials said Wednesday.
Eric Arlia, the director of pharmacy systems for Hartford HealthCare, said they expect to receive the vaccine within 24 hours of its emergency approval by the Food and Drug Administration and are prepared to quickly begin administering it to workers “that treat COVID patients or work on units that treat COVID patients.”
“We’ll be prepared and ready to receive the vaccine as early as Friday,” he said. “We have teams ready, even if it comes over the weekend we’ll be ready to receive it.”
The first vaccine clinics are scheduled next week for workers at hospitals including Hartford, Backus, Charlotte-Hungerford, MidState Medical Center, St. Vincent’s and the Hospital of Central Connecticut. Those could open earlier, depending on when the vaccine is delivered, officials said.
Arlia said he expects it will take two to three weeks to get the vaccine to all the front-line workers who wish to receive it.
Gov. Ned Lamont recently signed an executive order that allows pharmacists to administer the vaccine. Arlia said more than 50 pharmacists at Hartford HealthCare have signed up to assist the nursing staff there.
Yale New Haven Health has said assuming the FDA grants emergency approval, it plans to begin vaccinating its staff next week. Dr. Thomas Balcezak, the chief clinical officer for the system, said they hope to have 29,000 workers there vaccinated within three weeks.
“That 29,000 is our estimate of how many individuals we have that come in contact with patients,” Balcezak said. “It’s a massive undertaking.”
Arlia said once health care workers and state nursing home residents are vaccinated, those with the highest preexisting risk factors for severe COVID-19 infections are expected to be next in line.
“Our system and others will do our part to identify those patients and get them connected with the vaccine as quickly as possible,” he said.
Officials said they expect it will take a year before everyone is able to be vaccinated.
The state reported 2,290 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, bring the total for the pandemic above 140,000. The number of deaths related to the virus rose by another 42 to 5,285 and 39 more people were hospitalized with the virus, bringing the current total to 1,262.
The state’s seven-day rolling average of the positivity rate has risen over the past two weeks from 5.46% on Nov. 24 to 6.79% on Tuesday. State health departments are calculating positivity rate differently across the country, but for Connecticut the AP calculates the rate by dividing new cases by test specimens using data from The COVID Tracking Project.
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