When Spectrum Healthcare, which has been administering the majority of COVID-19 vaccines in Yavapai County, first opened up vaccine appointments on Jan. 19, it was forced to close them in just two days on Jan. 21, due to lack of vaccine supply and heavy demand.
After nearly two months of vaccinations, Spectrum is approaching completion of the second dose for every one of those initial appointments and hopes to open up the next round of appointments on Monday, March 15.
Spectrum Vice President of Integration Sunshine Dean stressed that the March 15 date is subject to change based on allocations of vaccines that the health care nonprofit receives in the coming weeks, and also stressed that when it does open, heavy demand could likely mean a repeat of the last round, with appointments filling up in days, if not hours.
“When we open up appointments, we will know ahead of time exactly how much vaccine we have for those appointments,” Dean said. “They go very quickly. As soon as we release that information, within a few hours they’ll be gone.” The first time that vaccines opened up at Spectrum, the heavy demand of people trying to sign up crashed the website. According to Dean, the group is hoping to avoid a repeat, mostly by using increased resources to open up phone lines for vaccine appointments as well, especially for elderly residents who might not beinternet-savvy.
The phone line for Spectrum’s vaccine appointments is 414-8884, and its website is spectrumhealthcare-group.com.
Dean recommended checking the website frequently for updates on when appointments would open up.
Since the first approval of COVID-19 vaccines by the Food and Drug Administration in December, the Verde Valley’s biggest obstacle to getting its population vaccinated has been the supply of vaccines received by Yavapai County from federal and state governments. According to the Arizona Department of Health Services, Yavapai County has utilized 96.4% of the vaccine doses that it has been allocated, with over 73,000 doses administered as of Friday, March 5, and 21.6% of the county has received at least a first dose, outstripping the statewide average of 18.3%.
According to Dean, the setup that Spectrum has for vaccine allocation — Findlay Toyota Center in Prescott and Verde Valley Christian Church in Cottonwood — would be able to handle far more appointments than they currently do if they got more supply of vaccine doses.
When the snowstorm a few weeks ago postponed vaccine appointments for a week, both centers were able to handle what was essentially a double load of vaccinations the following week without trouble.
“We got to test our capacity, and we still didn’t reach where we could have been,” Dean said. “We had days where we saw 1,300 people, and that still wasn’t that difficult.”
The county is also hoping to receive 1,800 doses of the recently approved Johnson & Johnson vaccine — which, unlike the Moderna Vaccine that has been used in Yavapai County so far, requires only one dose and can be stored more easily — in the coming week. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine will be distributed by Yavapai County Community Health Services and focused primarily on rural areas in the county such as Cordes Junction and Black Canyon City.
Spectrum hopes that it will also be allocated doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in the near future when it becomes more readily available, as a means of increasing supply.
On March 1, the state of Arizona announced that it would be shifting its vaccine strategy away from its initial “Phase” approach that focused on certain classes of residents, such as essential workers and residents of congregate settings, to a more age-based approach. The state also gave counties permission to move from the 65 and older age range for vaccine appointments to 55 and over if they had vaccinated enough of the older age bracket.
However, both Spectrum and Yavapai County have indicated intentions to stick with 65 and over for the immediate future. When Spectrum opens up new appointments, it intends to stick with just individuals over 65.
“We’ll be monitoring when we reach that benchmark and decide whether to open up to 55-plus,” YCCHS Public Information Officer Terri Farneti said.
As the vaccinations continue, the spread of COVID- 19 cases in Yavapai County continues to drop at an impressive rate. The entire county was averaging under 20 cases per day for the week from Feb. 26 through March 5. The total number of cases in the Verde Valley actually dropped during that period, as the county used the period of low case spread to clean up clerical errors that included duplicates or residents of other counties. While there have been new cases in the Verde Valley, the official tally dropped from 5,847 on Feb. 26 to 5,841 on March 5.
However, people in the area continued to die of the disease. There were eight COVID-related deaths in the Verde Valley in the same time period, some of which were counts of previous deaths that had not been tallied yet. Since the virus takes so long to fully affect those who get it, there continues to be a significant delay between cases and deaths.
