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It’s official: your 12-16 year-old kids can roll up their sleeves and take the Pfizer vaccine.
While children are less likely to pick up the COVID-19 virus, and will be far less likely to have a hard time with it if they do, they CAN still catch it. If they have low- or no symptoms they can also be unwitting carriers to adults and high-risk loved ones.
Area doctors are enthusiastic while the Craven County Schoolboard is helping spread the word to parents and organizations.
“The short answer: I think it’s fabulous,” Dr. Rad Moeller, vice-president of the North Carolina Rheumatology, who practices in New Bern and Havelock, said. Moeller has been closely tracking the vaccine development since its earliest stages.
By Holly Desrosier
The best nurses are often known for having a nurturing, compassionate spirit, and Cheryl Cournoyer is no exception. For years, she has been training upcoming generations of nurses and healthcare workers, many of whom will go on to work in local hospitals and offices that treat this community’s citizens.
“I teach my students that it s not all about academics,” she said. “You ve got to be a well-rounded student.”
Cheryl, who is from Canada, had a life-changing experience that prompted her to go into nursing. When she was 14, her father died suddenly from a massive heart attack, which encouraged her pursuit to help others.
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
Craven County Health Director Scott Harrelson believes that the county is seeing the light at the end of the COVID tunnel as more senior residents are inoculated and the number of people qualified to receive their shots is enlarged.
He noted that while, in the past, registrations for the vaccine would fill in a matter of half an hour, now they are remaining open longer – a sign that the vaccination process is going well. “We had over 250 appointments open for over 24 hours,” he said. “That’s the first time we had that. With less demand, we decided to open to teachers and daycare workers.”