Franklin County Health Department Director Judy Mattingly knows county residents are anxious to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. She said in Monday’s weekly COVID update by community leaders that the health department would like to relieve that anxiety.
“Please know, at the Franklin County Health Department, we’d love to get 50,000 doses to cover every single member of our community,” Mattingly said. “We are ready, willing and able to take that on; it is just our state as a whole is getting a very limited number of doses, and every dose we get we are getting out.” Mattingly said that as of 8 a.m. Monday, FCHD had received 2,000 COVID vaccine doses and administered 1,908.
Those numbers cover the weeks prior to this week. The 92 vaccines that had not been given from those 2,000 will be given this week. “Moving forward, we do have to be honest with our community that we are uncertain of how many doses of vaccine we’re going to get each week,” Mattingly said. “We learn late Friday afternoon what we’re going to get for the next week coming up.
“It’s very difficult to plan for the week coming up when you don’t know how many doses you’re going to have until they arrive on Monday and you hear about them sometime Friday evening.” Mattingly said most of the vaccine doses given have been first doses for those in Tier 1A, which includes health care workers. She added that the health department has administered some vaccines in residential facilities such as Stewart Home and School and Everyday Matters.
Walgreen’s and CVS vaccinated residents of long-term care facilities, she added, and most have been covered in Frankfort and Franklin County. Those vaccines that didn’t go to people in Tier 1A went to Tier 1B, and have mostly been given to first responders in Frankfort and Franklin County as well as school workers, according to Mattingly. She added that most county health departments have been mandated to cover all K-12 personnel last week and this week, with some counties partnering with private pharmacies.
“The other Tier 1B we’re very concerned about is the 70-and-over population,” Mattingly said. “We’ve been fortunate we’ve been able to include a few of those to date in the 1,908 vaccines that have been given.
“Those have been used to fill events when we can do 250 health care workers, but only 220 registered, so we were able to get 30 people over 70 who were signed up on our interest list at www.fchd.org.”
Mattingly discussed partnerships with private pharmacies, such as Kroger, that have been discussed in Gov. Andy Beshear’s press conferences.
The partnerships will provide regional sites for people in Tier 1B and Tier 1C, which includes people 60 and over and other essential workers. Mattingly said she thought the regional sites would open in early February, but no information on how to register for those sites has been released.
Mattingly advised people to watch the governor’s press conferences for more information and said that the health department would share that information as soon as it is received so citizens be vaccinated at those sites as well.
There are currently two options for quarantining for those who have been in contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID, and Mattingly explained them.
If a person has no symptoms at all and is a contact to a case, they may quarantine for 10 days. If a person has no symptoms after five days from the last date of contact with someone who tested positive, they may seek a COVID test. If they get a COVID test after five days from the last date of contact and it comes back negative, and the person still has no symptoms, they may come off quarantine after seven days.
Anyone who tests positive must isolate for 14 days. Mattingly said the best thing to do as a contact is a 14-day quarantine. According to the health department’s latest COVID numbers, there have been 2,828 cases since the start of the pandemic. There are 193 active cases of the virus in Franklin County, including 153 in the general population, 37 in schools (K-12 and college students and staff) and three in long-term care facilities.
The health department also announced that two more Franklin Countians have died while positive for the coronavirus. A total of 35 county residents have died and 2,600 have recovered. Since the start of January, FCHD has recorded 717 new COVID-19 cases, including 277 last week alone. Both the monthly and weekly case counts are records.
On the state’s incidence rate map, which is the average daily new coronavirus cases over the past seven days per 100,000 population, the county remains in the red zone at 64.2. Counties in the red zone have an incidence rate greater than 25.