Situation remains fluid as hundreds of SE MN educators, seniors prepare for first dose of vaccine

Olmsted County Public Health laid out additional details Tuesday regarding the state’s new Covid-19 vaccine pilot program, indicating that some senior citizens and educators in southeast Minnesota will receive their first vaccine dose by the end of the week.

Amy Evans, Olmsted County’s team leader on vaccine distribution, said 975 doses of the Pfizer vaccine would be made available to the new priority groups by this Thursday and would be distributed over the weekend. Hundreds more doses for the pilot program are scheduled to arrive next week, although the exact number is unclear.

“It’s a very complex situation, in that we can communicate to who is going to get the vaccine based on which provider actually receives it from the state,” said Evans. “We have multiple plans in place if Public Health receives a large amount of vaccine, and we have plans if Mayo or OMC receive large shipments of vaccine — we just don’t know what will happen yet.”

While the pilot program marks the beginning of Phase 1B vaccination, Phase 1A is not yet complete. A large majority of Minnesota’s 60,000 dose-per-week allotment is still earmarked for critical health care workers; roughly 12,000 doses per week will go towards the statewide pilot program.

While doses will remain scarce, residents over 65 years of age, plus selected teachers and child care workers, are now eligible to register for vaccination through a portal on the Minnesota Department of Health website. In a matter of hours after the portal went live Tuesday afternoon, an “extremely high volume of calls and traffic” led MDH to close access to new users. 

By Tuesday night, the MDH website said appointments had been filled for the week — and advised users to come back on January 26 to review additional available time slots.

‘We’re getting very limited doses’

Superintendent Michael Muñoz said Rochester Public Schools was allocated 42 doses of vaccine by the Minnesota Department of Education, after looking at the proportion of educators in Rochester’s workforce. The 42 employees have already been selected and were invited to use the registration portal.

Because the Rochester site serves the region, vaccines will also be allocated to school districts across southeast Minnesota. On Tuesday, MDH Commissioner Jan Malcolm said there will be equal split between doses going to 65+ seniors and educators.

Muñoz said MDH gave the district specific guidelines to decide who the first school staff to receive the vaccine should be.

“Things like staff providing in-person or hybrid learning, child care providers, special ed staff working with intense student populations, occupational risk, and age — those are all the factors districts are using to decide who receives a vaccine,” said Muñoz.

Olmsted County Public Health Director Graham Briggs said the pilot program will start “very small,” but will serve a broader purpose than simply starting the Phase 1B process. As vaccine production ramps up, the main goal of the pilot program is to test the distribution plans created by Public Health, and make adjustments as necessary before mass inoculation is possible.

“We’re getting very limited doses, considering the amount of demand in the population,” said Briggs. “We generally don’t know more than a week or two out how many doses we’ll receive. As some kinks get worked out in production and distribution, we hope we’ll start finding some rhythm in knowing how many doses we’ll receive on a weekly basis.”

At this juncture, Briggs says 12 percent of Olmsted County’s population have received at least one dose of vaccine — still the second-highest proportion of any Minnesota county.

Isaac Jahns is a Rochester native and a 2019 graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism. He reports on politics, business and music for Med City Beat.

Cover photo licensed via Canva