Rita Johnson became ill with COVID-19 and was hospitalized in July. She has recovered and received her first dose of vaccine against the novel coronavirus on Jan. 22. (Photo courtesy VCU Health)
Got your COVID-19 vaccine invitation? No? You’re not alone.
The good news is that as of today, 599,429 people have received at least one dose of vaccine in the commonwealth, according to the Virginia Department of Health. That’s a start, but that also represents just 6.5% of the state’s population.
The supply of vaccine has been expanding, but it’s been slow, and the search process to sign up has been haphazard.
Gov. Ralph Northam and other state officials in an update on Wednesday outlined how the state is ramping up its efforts to boost vaccine delivery. Northam noted that Virginia and other states were set this week to receive 16% more doses and that supplies would be received on a consistent basis, which will help with planning. “This is really good news, and it’s one critical part of our plan to get more shots in more arms, more quickly,” he said.
NPR reported today that about 6.5% of Americans have received a COVID-19 vaccination, accounting for 26 million doses since the campaign began in mid-December. About 1 million doses are doled out across the nation each day.
Virginia’s goal of administering 25,000 vaccine doses daily has been met, and the commonwealth seven-day average today is 27,080. Virginia currently ranks about 11th nationally among states in total number of vaccines administered and 26th nationally in per capita vaccination (about 7,000 per 100,000 state residents). The current goal is ramping the process up to 50,000 doses daily, according to Northam. The state and the national goal is to get Americans immunized by summer’s end. “People are counting on us to work harder and faster,” Northam says.
Under vaccine priority guidelines, the state is allocating half its available vaccine doses to people 65 and older and half to essential workers and people with severe illnesses and other conditions that make them most at risk. The state is also seeking to make it easier to sign up to receive a vaccine and will expand its call center. Northam acknowledged the confusion over the tangle of signup and information sources currently available and says that he takes this “seriously because I know people just want answers” and that it has “been a great frustration for a lot of Virginians.”
Virginia is in phase 1b of vaccination efforts. Learn more about COVID-19 and the state's response here.
Rita Johnson is among the early vaccine recipients. She received the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Jan. 22. She’s one of the lucky ones. The pathology support services manager with VCU Health, she was sickened with COVID-19 last July. Her illness was severe and necessitated hospitalization. Her oxygen levels were so problematic that it brought her to the brink of admission into the ICU unit, but she improved in time to avoid intensive care.
For her, COVID-19 came on with symptoms akin to a common cold. That was an “uh-oh” moment: “I thought that was strange for me, because I don’t get colds in the summertime,” she says. She was at work but went home. The next morning began with a low-grade elevated temperature. She drove herself in for a COVID-19 test. Her fever was up, so she knew she likely would test positive. Swabbed and sent home, her results came back positive the next day, and she self-quarantined. Her fever fluctuated over the next few days, rising to 102.6 degrees. As the days progressed into a week, she became more lethargic and experienced digestive distress and shortness of breath. She lost her sense of taste (but not her sense of smell, oddly), and her husband took her to the emergency room, but she was sent home. Her oxygen levels fell, and two days later she returned to the emergency room and was admitted to a COVID-19 unit. She was placed on oxygen, and her care team feared she would need to be moved to an ICU, but she rallied.
She was released after two weeks and returned home, where she was remotely monitored.
Recovery was slow. Her cough persisted, and her energy was drained. She was finally able to return to part-time work on Sept. 8, some six weeks after her ordeal had begun.
She’s back to full-time work, but like many COVID-19 patients, Johnson continues to deal with its aftermath. “Even now, if I’ve had a very long day, I still get fatigued. So at the end of the day, I go home, I may get a little bite to eat, and then I often fall asleep on the sofa because I’m tired,” she says.
Johnson says that she took a long look at the COVID-19 vaccinations before agreeing to receive it. She was initially skeptical because it was developed and produced so quickly. “That’s kind of where my mind was,” she says. Also, she had been ill with the novel coronavirus, and had antibodies to it, and she worried that if she received the shot, she might be taking the place of someone who needed it more.
But she read up on it. She found that antibodies likely provided protection six months out, and that the vaccine would extend that protection, providing immunity for a longer period of time.
Dr. Gonzalo Bearman, the chair of the division of infectious diseases for VCU and a hospital epidemiologist, says in an email statement that the duration of immunity is unknown for those who were infected with COVID-19, and that it is important for them to be vaccinated to heighten immunity and prevent another infection. He adds that the vaccine will “likely protect individuals from the new virus strains.”
Johnson received her first dose the morning of Jan. 22, and by that afternoon, she had had no major reaction, just some unusual sweating.
She acknowledges that there is skepticism out there regarding COVID-19 and the vaccines, and she wants people to know what it’s like to be severely ill with the coronavirus, as well as its impact on your family and friends. “I know what the other side of that looks like, I know what my family went through, and my friends, and how worried and concerned they were for me,” she says. “If I can just let one person know that even though we may not know all of the side effects associated with the vaccine, I do believe that the side effects are minimal compared to what the virus can actually do to the body.”
