How many in Phase 1b want COVID-19 vaccines? Here’s what Beaufort Co. hospitals report
Thousands of people rushed to sign up for COVID-19 vaccinations at hospitals in Beaufort and Jasper counties last week as Phase 1b of eligibility opened to South Carolinians.
The recent scramble for doses was comparable to the surge of vaccine demand after Gov. Henry McMaster and state health officials allowed residents 70 or older to join Phase 1a in mid-January.
Last week’s Phase 1b sign-ups at Hilton Head and Coastal Carolina hospitals, though, didn’t surpass the number of Phase 1a registrations the facilities reported on Jan. 13.
Daisy Burroughs, a spokesperson for Tenet Healthcare, which owns the two hospitals, wrote in a statement that roughly 7,500 people were added into the Vaccine Administration Management System, or VAMS, after submitting information last week to Hilton Head Regional Healthcare via its online vaccine form.
Residents can use VAMS to schedule appointments at several local providers.
In comparison, on Jan. 13, when Phase 1a expanded to seniors, the two hospitals were flooded with over 10,000 sign-up submissions within a few hours. Hilton Head Regional Healthcare’s vaccine information wouldn’t load in some web browsers at the time due to the high volume of online traffic.
Burroughs wrote that nearly 2,000 vaccine appointments were added at the health care system last week once Phase 1b opened on March 8.
“We are slated to fulfill a few thousand vaccine appointments this week,” she wrote, “and will be adding more appointments in the coming weeks.”
Beaufort Memorial Hospital, meanwhile, didn’t have a wait list for appointments as of 9 a.m. Tuesday, spokesperson Courtney McDermott wrote.
Instead, the medical facility had emailed 6,975 Phase 1b-eligible people who signed up for shots to give them instructions on how to schedule an appointment at the hospital’s Port Royal vaccine clinic, McDermott wrote in a statement early Tuesday.
The hospital is now allowing people to self-register for appointments in VAMS on a “week-by-week basis,” she wrote. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently upgraded VAMS, she wrote, making it easier for the hospital to manage the system’s scheduling function.
“We are only opening up our VAMS schedules one week at a time,” McDermott wrote. “This allows us to understand how many second-dose appointments we have to accommodate in a given week, then determine how many first-dose appointments we can open in VAMS for the same week.
“This will prevent overbooking and allow us to better manage our inventory, staffing, etc.”
After the Phase 1a expansion in mid-January, Beaufort Memorial Hospital had more than 6,000 appointments on the books (it was quickly forced to cancel thousands of appointments and create a wait list due to unpredictable vaccine supply from the federal government). The hospital at the time also decided to leave 6,000 appointment requests unscheduled until doses became available.
The hospital has since worked through that backlog and is Beaufort County’s largest vaccinator, according to the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control.
The local medical centers, meanwhile, might be less worried about appointment cancellations during Phase 1b, as vaccine production increases and DHEC rolls out a new allocation formula.
The state’s updated distribution system, which was used this week, includes Pfizer-BioNTech “baselines” for weekly first doses.
Medical centers like Beaufort Memorial Hospital are guaranteed a set vaccine shipment each week, barring a major production shortfall or some other “tragedy,” said Nick Davidson, DHEC’s senior deputy for public health.
Beaufort Memorial Hospital will receive at least 2,340 first Pfizer doses per week. Hilton Head Hospital will get at least 1,002 first doses. Coastal Carolina Hospital now has a baseline of 1,866 first Pfizer doses. (Second-dose deliveries will be based on first-dose shipments.)
“That will make everybody’s lives easier,” Davidson said.
This story was originally published March 17, 2021 at 1:15 PM.
