Can Kansas have a normal summer? Here’s how many more vaccine doses are needed weekly.
The top doctor leading the Kansas response to the coronavirus pandemic said the state needs five times as many COVID-19 vaccine doses each week in order for Kansans to have a normal summer in 2021.
The comment from Dr. Lee Norman, secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment, came during a Tuesday morning media briefing hosted by the University of Kansas Health System.
Norman was asked: “What is the rate of ramp-up that we would have to have across Kansas in order to get back to summer fairs and fall festivals and baseball and weddings, or is that number even achievable?”
“It’s not achievable,” Norman answered, “at the current rate of vaccine production and delivery. But it is achievable if we would have five times the amount of vaccine that we have right now.
“You can figure out that if we’re doing 80,000 doses a week and we’ve got 1.7 million people that will want the vaccine ... it will take a long time to get there.”
Kansas has a population greater than 2.9 million people, but Norman said many people would opt out of the inoculations. Additionally, vaccines have not yet been approved for children younger than 16.
At 80,000 doses per week, it would take about 43 weeks to have enough doses for 1.7 million people to get two shots. That would be early December. Five times that rate would be 400,000 doses per week, which would cut the time to about nine weeks, or mid-April.
Kansas hasn’t even administered 400,000 doses in the approximately two months since the vaccines were first approved by the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use, according to KDHE data.
“We have got to speed up the timeline,” said Dr. Steve Stites, the chief medical officer at The University of Kansas Health System. “The only way to really speed up the timeline is to have high production. The only way to have high production is to get both Moderna and Pfizer ramped up ... (and) trying to get these other players into the market.”
Novavax, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson all have COVID-19 vaccines in phase three of clinical trials, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Norman said he is “optimistic” that Kansas will see a “gradual uptick” in the number of vaccine doses as production times become faster. Additional vaccine companies would lead to a “larger incremental jump.”
“I think it (won’t) be for a few weeks at least before we see a dramatic increase, but I think we’ll even within the next few weeks will see a gradual increase,” he said. “Will it keep up with what we need? No, heavens no.”
As of Monday, the KDHE had reported 303,691 doses administered out of 413,350 total doses distributed to the state. The CDC’s data showed more doses delivered to Kansas, but fewer doses administered. The federal statistics had Kansas ranked 49th out 50 states for doses administered per capita.
“We know that’s a low number ... with so many hundreds of vaccinating sites, getting the data in has been very difficult,” Norman said. He added that “it is always a nightmare,” that the system interface is “gobbledygook” and reporting is slowed because providers are required to enter data twice.
He said the KDHE knows there have been about 100,000 additional doses administered that have not yet been recorded in the data system.
“The real problem is there’s just not enough vaccine,” Stites said. “As we ramp up, the next problem is going to be the logistics to give that much vaccine, and getting it all entered into the database, which we have got to clean up.”
Stites said mitigation measures, including wearing masks and avoiding social gatherings, have been effective at reducing the number of local COVID-19 hospitalizations. Norman said that statewide coronavirus numbers are improving for new cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
“If people are back out in society and going to the Royals games, going back to church, back to the restaurants, back to the things we all love to do, then at that point if we still have eight or 10 patients in the hospital, that’s something we can live with honestly,” Stites said. “Because COVID-19 is not going to go away for a while.”
The University of Kansas Health System in Kansas City was treating 78 total patients with COVID-19 as of Tuesday. That is down from 120 patients two weeks ago.
“We still have our hands full,” Norman said of the statewide situation with the coronavirus pandemic.
Dr. Dana Hawkinson, KU’s medical director of infection prevention and control, credited the improving coronavirus trends to the effectiveness of infection prevention measures. He said the emerging coronavirus variants have not surged in the U.S. because of those measures.
“It is a behavioral disease at this point,” Hawkinson said. “If everybody can continue to do the masking, the distancing, not meeting in large groups, not interacting with other bubbles, that is the way to move forward until we can get a more sizable proportion of the general public vaccinated.”
This story was originally published February 9, 2021 at 8:18 PM.