VACCINE CLINIC

COVID-19 & Vaccination update from Fitchburg BOH 2.4.21

COVID VACCINATION UPDATE BOARD OF HEALTH.jpg

I attended tonight's Fitchburg Board of Health Meeting discussing the COVID-19 Case update and VACCINE Distribution updates

--COVID-19 Update 2-4-21
241 Active Cases, up from the last few days, it was heading down but we've seen a little spike due to a couple clusters, one being a gym that spiked 20 cases.
--Total 3,783 cases since March 1st.
--3,408 have Recovered.
--134 deaths since March 1st and 8 deaths in the last 2 weeks.

VACCINATION UPDATE
The week of January 11th we did 4 clinics with 800 vaccines, for first responders in Phase 1. School nurses and volunteer nurses helped with this effort.
The vaccine is coming in at about 100 doses a week since the 800 doses.
We conducted a clinic last Friday at Wallace Towers for all residents and staff that wanted it...there were a number of cases there so it was a good use of the vaccine.

We got 100 doses yesterday and are scheduled for 5 clinics next week, 4 of which are for the second round of vaccine for first responders... the 5th clinic will be on February 16th at the Fitchburg Senior Center & they are hoping to open up for the 75+ residents--- but that will be depending on how many vaccines we receive.

We are still in Phase 1, congregate housing, including OFH --- and teamed with the Montachusett Public Health Network to order 1300 vaccines... but DPH tells us for a few weeks we likely are only to receive 100 vaccine doses per week.

All the vaccines we get are Moderna. We are getting a large freezer next week, so we could order Pfizer vaccines and hopefully we can get more vaccine doses. The freezer can store thousands of doses if we can get them.

We are trying to schedule more clinics for 75+ and beyond, but the vaccine supply is just not there. We are trying to secure more vaccines now and will announce when we can schedule these clinics. There are 2,333 residents that are 75+ in the city. We will try to contact these seniors with mailers and perhaps with the CodeRED notification system when we have vaccines available.

Sign up for CodeRED here: https://public.coderedweb.com/CNE/en-US/935619C9E41F

We have issued over 1000 vaccine doses and have had 2 incident of reaction, one was a minor rash and one was related to anxiety. We are hearing word that the second doses causes some more increased flu-like symptoms for approx. 24 hours in some people.