State and local public health agencies are not working together to quickly bring the COVID-19 vaccination to residents, an issue that needs to be remedied, Jeff Zayach, executive director of Boulder County Public Health, said Tuesday night.
“Communication has been extremely frustrating,” Zayach told the city council. “We have been challenged to make sure we have good coordination with the state and local public health agencies. We will continue to work on that.”
Zayach told the council the problem is the lack of available vaccines for people on the Phase 1A and Phase 1B list of vaccine recipients.
The county is currently in Phases 1A and 1B, which focus on hospital and outpatient health care workers, and residents and staff of skilled nursing facilities, long-term care facilities, assisted living facilities, and residents 70 and older, Zayach told the council.
The top tier of Phase 1B focuses on moderate-risk health care workers, first responders, other frontline workers and those aged 70 years or older, according to the Boulder County COVID-19 website.
“We have the ability to provide 20,000 doses a week right now,” Zayach told the council. “We are only getting 3,000 doses a week, well below our capacity to provide the vaccine.”
As of Tuesday, 16,794 Boulder County residents have received one COVID-19 vaccine dose and 2,455 have received the second dose, Zayach said.
“We have to go back and make adjustments” to get vaccine to the additional 30,000 people added to Phase 1B, he said.
Boulder County and the rest of the state, meanwhile, appears to have avoided a large spike in COVID-19 cases after the holidays, Zayach told the council. He said that is due largely to residents following social distancing, masking mandates and hand hygiene.
Boulder County’s 14-day positivity rate is 4.0 percent while also experiencing 11 days of declining or stable hospitalizations, according to the county COVID-19 website.
“Colorado has really dodged a tsunami that others have not been successful at dodging,” he said. “People are doing the right things. They are taking this seriously and it's paying off for us.”
Clarification: The phase of the statewide vaccination plan that Boulder County is in was unclear in the original posting of this story. The county is in Phases 1A and 1B and is ajdusting its plans to vaccinate the 30,000 people added to Phase 1B when the state revamped its priority plan.
