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If you’re a numbers kind of person, here are some statistics regarding COVID-19 and the vaccine war in the region.
Remember that data is a tricky thing, and the numbers depend on the sources. State figures rarely match local figures. For instance, while the NCDHHS has listed Craven with having given 14,922 first doses of vaccine as of March 3, the county’s figures list that number as 14,314. This article uses NCDHHS figures.
Here are the figures given by NCDHHS, COVID and vaccine-wise in area counties:
COVID, as of March 3:
Statewide, on March 3rd, 2,145 cases were reported, compared to a high of 12,079 on February 3. 24,503 tests had been administered compared to a high of 68,640 on February 4. 1,303 people were hospitalized as compared to a high of 2,789 on January 31st. The total cases of COVID in the state are 865,554 out of an estimated statewide population of 10,488,084. The total deaths have been 11,389. That means that roughly 8 percent of the state’s residents have
Sun Journal
Craven County Health Director Scott Harrelson had just gotten off the phone when he returned my call. He’d been trying to calm down angry senior citizens wondering what’s taking so long to get their COVID vaccines. “It’s been a real week,” he sighed. “The state really did a number on us this last go-round.”
Harrelson does not hide his frustration with the state. Craven County has been working tirelessly to get out every dose it receives, he said – a kind of triumvirate between the county, Coastal Carolina Health Care and CarolinaEast Health Systems, reaching out to patients and residents and setting up appointments to use every dose the county gets. “We’re getting rid of it within seven days of receiving it,” he said.
Craven Country’s fight against COVID-19 took another step forward this week with the vaccination of 450 seniors at Coastal Carolina Health Care in New Bern.
Held on Tuesday, January 13, the event was part of the county’s Phase 1b-Group 1 COVID-19 vaccination process, which focuses on adults 75 years or older.
Dr. Kenneth Wilkins, internal medicine specialist at CCHC, said CCHC staff made a list of patients in that age group and ranked them by the number of conditions in their medical records.
“From that we can generate something called a risk score and we started with the highest risk score and contacted those patients and worked our way down the list,” said Wilkins.
FAIRFIELD-SUISUN, CALIFORNIA
Refrigerated boxes of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine at the Seminole County Vaccine Point of Dispensing Site in Florida, before its opening, on Monday, Dec. 28, 2020. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel/TNS)
Covid-19 vaccines sit at hospitals as doctors, pharmacies await doses
WASHINGTON Stephen Nuckolls, who runs a North Carolina health care medical group called Coastal Carolina Health Care, has deep freezers capable of storing the two authorized Covid-19 vaccines and hundreds of staff ready to give it. But after two weeks of emailing the North Carolina health department, he couldn’t get a supply.
“My medical practice and many others have mostly completed our annual flu shot clinics and have staff and freezers (yes -70c) standing by to administer the shots,” he wrote in a Dec. 23 email to the Medical Group Management Association, a Washington, D.C.-based trade group representing independent practices. “But despite our repeated emails to