Mass vaccination for Virginia (from my email)

A vaccination center with 4 vaccination stations requiring 58 staff (only 16 of which seem to need medical training to prepare and administer vaccines and 1 EMT on hand for adverse reactions (I imagine med students and military/other governmental personnel could also be used in this endeavor)) working a total of 16 hours/day (i.e. 2 shifts) is estimated to be able to vaccinate 1900 people per day.

If there were 50 of these across Virginia, the entire population could be given one dose in 90 days. Given that 2 doses are required, you could get the vaccination done by summer (if there were no supply constraints). With 30 vaccination centers, Virginia could be done distributing its 317,000 remaining unadministered doses in 5 days. Instead, Virginia reported 828 vaccinations yesterday. (I’m hoping Virginia is already finished with nursing facilities since Kaiser estimates that Virginia only had 19,900 residents in skilled nursing facilities in 2019).

And staffing is easily solved. 30 vaccination centers require 480 medical personnel to prepare and administer the vaccine and 30 EMTs. There are about 120,000 nurses in Virginia. Chances are, more than 480 nurses were on vacation for longer than 5 days at some point this past year so it won’t cripple the healthcare system. Getting 1 percent of the nursing workforce for this should not be that hard (and that’s not including med students and military/other governmental personnel who could also aid in this endeavor).

What boggles my mind is the number of staff they have allocated for paperwork.

If the US had been prepared, it could’ve set up a system of vaccination tickets with QR codes (much like tickets for air travel or going to a sporting event) that could be handed out by primary care physicians, hospitals, etc. (or just based on administrative records of age). Those would transfer the relevant data that would have been collected by the paperwork people. People would schedule a slot via some app (even doctors’ offices have online scheduling now), show up, provide ID verification, and get the shot. So you could open up a vaccination center with less staff. I get that not everyone has a smartphone, but seriously, this is not that hard.

The more you think about how many times large logistics problems are solved every single day by 100s and 1000s of organizations, the performance of the US just looks worse and worse.

From a loyal (and anonymous) MR reader.

Comments

Comments for this post are closed