Fearing shortage, Kansas City officials plead for more doctors to give COVID vaccines
The Kansas City Health Department has put out a call to get local physicians and clinics signed up as COVID-19 vaccine providers to make sure as many people as possible get the shot.
“The city needs many more doctors and clinics to join the vaccination effort,” Dr. Rex Archer, the city’s health director, said in a statement. “If there’s a shortage of places people can receive it, it will take too long, and we will remain in crisis.”
On Tuesday, the metro added 960 new COVID-19 cases and recorded 34 more deaths. The area that includes Kansas City, Jackson, Clay and Platte counties in Missouri, and Johnson and Wyandotte counties in Kansas has seen a total of 121,591 cases to date.
“There’s still tremendous uncertainty about when vaccine supplies will meet demand. While we wait, we need physicians and clinics to get ready,” said Archer.
The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services is enrolling vaccinators on its website, health.mo.gov.
Missouri is in the first phase of distributing the vaccine to front-line health care workers and nursing home residents and staff.
Kansas City health officials are also trying to locate local health care workers who have direct contact with patients but don’t have a designated place to get vaccinated. That would include home health care workers and contract workers hired by hospitals or clinics.
Archer’s department urges local health care workers, or any organization that provides medical care, to complete an online survey at research.net/r/KCMOCOVID.
As of Monday, the health department had connected 1,970 health care workers with local vaccine providers to get shots; many have already received their first dose, officials said.
Archer’s department is also working to roll out the limited number of vaccines it has received. At a news conference Wednesday he said the city has only received 975 doses so far, but that would likely yield close to 1,100 shots because each dose contains slightly more than is necessary.
Officials are working to administer them as efficiently as possible. Residents can fill out a survey on the city’s website to say they want to receive the vaccine, and health officials will assess and prioritize residents based on their levels of exposure and underlying health conditions.
That survey is available at kcmo.gov/coronavirus.
In Jackson County, residents and people who work in the county who want to get the vaccine are asked to take a survey and sign up online. The survey — on the Jackson County Health Department’s website at jacohd.org/covid-19-vaccine-survey-tool — asks for contact information, occupation and pre-existing medical conditions.
People will be vaccinated largely according to occupation and risk status — basically where they fall on the vaccine priority schedule created by the state. Answering the survey questions does not guarantee a vaccination appointment, the health department says.
Archer warned that life won’t go back to normal immediately after residents receive the vaccine.
It will limit the risk of a severe case or death, he said, but it is yet to be determined whether the vaccine guards people against mild or non-symptomatic cases, meaning they might still be able to spread the virus even if they don’t get sick.
“Once you are vaccinated — and that’s two weeks after the second dose — your life, actually, isn’t going to change very much,” Archer said, adding that people would still need to wear masks even after they are vaccinated.
A recent poll from the Missouri Hospital Association revealed that almost a quarter of Missourians say they will definitely not get the COVID-19 vaccine, suggesting that health officials have work left to convince the general public to get the shot.
Includes reporting by The Star’s Allison Kite.
This story was originally published January 13, 2021 at 1:49 PM.
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