COVID-19 vaccine to be limited at first. How many may be available in each SC county?
Estimates vary for when the coronavirus vaccine will be ready, and each state’s plans for widespread distribution are even less certain.
But a new tool by a team of data scientists and epidemiologists at Harvard University and one of America’s top hospitals is helping to shed light on that. It’s called the Vaccine Allocation Planner for COVID-19.
President Donald Trump said the U.S. should have a coronavirus vaccine “within weeks” during the second and third debates leading up to the Nov. 3 election. Epidemiologists, however, have said that kind of a turnaround is unlikely.
“In the midst of the pandemic, we will face a scarce supply of the COVID-19 vaccines,” said Dr. Rebecca Weintraub in a news release announcing the tool. “...Unfortunately, too often scarce resources go to the most privileged. We built this tool for leaders with the data they will need on available vaccine doses, priority populations, and at risk communities to plan for effective and equitable vaccine distribution.“
Weintraub is the director of vaccine delivery at Ariadne Labs and an associate physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Ariadne Labs — a joint venture with Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health — and the nonprofit Surgo Foundation worked to create the Vaccine Allocation Planner.
How it works
The Vaccine Allocation Planner allows users to toggle results by state according to who it wants to vaccinate first, how many doses will be available and how it wants to allocate the vaccine in any given county — whether by population size or those most vulnerable.
It does so by prioritizing vulnerable populations according to recommendations by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which suggest allocating the vaccine in phases.
- Phase 1A: High-risk workers in health facilities; first responders
- Phase 1B: People with significant underlying health conditions; people living in congregate care settings
- Phase 2: Critical workers in high-risk workplaces (public transit, grocery stores, etc.); teachers and school staff; people with moderate underlying health conditions; older adults; people living in homeless shelters or group homes; incarcerated people and jail staff
- Phase 3: Young adults; children; remaining critical risk workers
- Phase 4: Everyone else in the U.S.
The recommendations largely align with what the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told states in early September.
Users can then select whether the vaccine will require one or two doses. Ongoing clinical trials have shown candidates receiving the vaccine in more than one dose, “meaning the real thing will likely be administered the same way,” McClatchy News previously reported.
The Vaccine Allocation Planner for SC
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, South Carolina has a population of roughly 5 million. If the U.S. manufactured 10 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine to start, the Vaccine Allocation Planner estimates South Carolina would be given about 153,037 doses.
If the vaccine requires two doses, as scientists have predicted, that means there will be 76,518 courses available for the 800,709 people in South Carolina who qualify for the vaccine under phase 1A and 1B, according to the planner.
Proportional to population, Greenville, Richland, Charleston, Horry and Spartanburg counties would receive the highest number of vaccine courses. But across the state, less than 10% of all qualifying residents in each county — regardless of size — would get the vaccine using those metrics.
Broken down by category, that means about 9% of first responders, older adults, high-risk health care workers and people with significant underlying conditions in South Carolina would receive a vaccine to start.
The figures continue to dwindle if users factor in later phases and the number of available vaccine doses doesn’t increase.
The Trump Administration has said it plans to “deliver 300 million doses of safe and effective vaccines with the initial doses available by January 2021” under what’s known as Operation Warp Speed. If that proves possible and the two-dose regimen was still required, that means South Carolina would have almost 2.3 million courses, according to the planner.
That many vaccines would cover nearly 63% of eligible residents in each South Carolina county for the first three phases of vaccine distribution. Hundreds of thousands of South Carolinians, however, would still be unvaccinated.
South Carolina’s plan for distribution
The CDC required every state to submit a plan for vaccine distribution by Oct. 16. Similar to the Vaccine Allocation Planner, the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control has planned for distributing the vaccine in phases.
Under phase one, officials said they are planning for a “potentially limited number of doses available.” That shifts under phase two, when DHEC said a larger number of doses might be on hand and “supply (is) likely to meet demand.”
“Not everyone who wants a vaccine initially will be able to get one,” DHEC state epidemiologist Linda Bell said during a news conference announcing the plan. “When the vaccine is first available, those limited supplies will be reserved for those who are at highest risk of either getting COVID-19, being exposed to it or potentially spreading it, as well as other critical infrastructure workers.”
Here’s what state officials say that might look like:
- Phase 1A: People who work in health care and are unable to work from home
- Phase 1B: Essential workers (i.e. health care personnel not included in Phase 1A, emergency and law enforcement workers, food packaging and distribution workers, teachers/school staff and childcare providers); people at increased risk for severe illness associated with COVID-19; people 65 and older
- Phase 2: Continue identifying target populations and push administration of the vaccine “through public health events as well as doctor’s offices and pharmacies,” The State reported.
- Phase 3: Open access with widespread availability
This story was originally published October 28, 2020 at 1:13 PM.
