GREENFIELD — Tim Livesay stood next to a cart holding a box in an elevator descending from Hancock Regional Hospital’s loading dock Thursday morning.
From the outside, the package didn’t look all that different from any other medium-sized shipping box. Inside, however, was a piece of the historic efforts to stop a virus that’s infected almost 75 million people and killed more than 1.6 million across the world.
“It’s like a shipment of gold,” said Livesay, director of pharmacy for the hospital, of the 975 doses of a COVID-19 vaccine in the box.
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Click here to purchase photos from this galleryAlmost 200 of those doses are slated to go into the arms of front-line health-care workers today (Friday, Dec. 18). The delivery brings Hancock County, where COVID-19 is known to have infected 4,331 people and killed 75, into the nationwide vaccination initiative that began earlier this week.
Hancock Regional Hospital’s COVID-19 vaccine dlivery from Pfizer arrived shortly after 9 a.m. Thursday. Livesay carted the 70-pound box to the hospital’s pharmacy, where he carefully sliced open the package’s tape with a box cutter and followed provided instructions to ensure he unpacked the contents correctly.
He pressed a button on a thermometer in the box that read “stop shipping,” initiating a series of green flashing lights indicating the box’s temperature was adequate.
Wearing protective gloves, he then removed a dry ice pack as fog billowed out of the box.
Eventually he removed a small and slender box containing the 975 doses in 195 vials, which he placed into the hospital’s new freezer capable of keeping the vaccine cold enough. The screen on the freezer’s door read -72 degrees Celsius, which is almost -98 degrees Fahrenheit.
Handling the vaccine itself wasn’t too nerve-racking, said Livesay, for whom it’s not uncommon to handle medications costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. He did admit with a laugh, however, that he was a little nervous about handling the dry ice, a substance that doesn’t often figure into his or his colleagues’ responsibilities.
As the vaccination effort is funded by the federal government, the doses didn’t cost the hospital anything and won’t cost recipients, either.
The box the doses came in goes back to Pfizer, Livesay said. The dry ice will be properly disposed of outside on pavement, he added, where it’s well ventilated and can eventually melt.
Livesay said enough vials for upcoming vaccinations would be taken out of the freezer Thursday night and placed into a refrigerator to thaw.
On Friday morning, the vials will be brought into a large classroom in the hospital hosting the vaccinations. Before appointments begin today, doses will start to be diluted with a sterile sodium chloride used for injections.
“Once we get it thawed, it’s no different from anything we ever do,” Livesay said. “It’s pretty straight forward at that point in time.”
The hospital will vaccinate four people every 10 minutes from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. today. Jason Wells, professional and organizational development coordinator for Hancock Regional Hospital, said recipients will be health-care workers in Hancock, Shelby and Rush counties who have received a link to register to receive the vaccine at the hospital.
“We’ve asked and requested that anybody who gets the vaccine works in a high-risk, high-probability of interacting with COVID patients,” Wells said, adding that includes those who work in emergency rooms, intensive care units and long-term care facilities.
Livesay said 195 people have signed up to receive the vaccine on the first day.
The classroom has three rows of four tables. At 8 a.m., a nurse will be stationed at each table in the first row, where they’ll administer shots to the first four recipients. Those recipients will remain for a 15-minute observation period. At 8:10, recipients will fill the second row of tables, and the nurses will move on to them. At 8:15, the first group of recipients can leave. The process will repeat throughout the day.
Recipients will return in 21 days to get the second dose of the vaccine. After that, it’s about another two weeks to achieve the 95% immunity from the virus revealed during testing.
The hospital’s next vaccination day is Monday, Dec. 21, which was almost completely booked as of Thursday morning, Wells said.
He said the state will decide when the hospital gets its next shipment.
“It’s a moving target,” he continued, adding Indiana officials are able to monitor schedules and supply levels for all vaccination locations across the state and make decisions on when and where more doses should go.
As professional and organizational development coordinator for the hospital, Wells said education will continue to be among his main focuses heading into vaccinations.
“I want people to know that it’s safe and effective and we’re here to end the pandemic together,” he said.
Work on the technology that made the vaccine possible — known as messenger RNA — has been underway for years, Wells said. But red tape and a lack of funding kept it from getting widely distributed. The emergency of the pandemic drove the funding and ridding of red tape to bring it to fruition.
“It wasn’t rushed,” he said. “It just wasn’t delayed.”
Many vaccines put a weakened germ into bodies to trigger an immune response. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains that messenger RNA vaccines teach cells how to make a protein that triggers an immune response and produces antibodies and protection from getting infected if the virus enters a body.
COVID-19 messenger RNA vaccines allow immune systems to recognize the protein that’s made doesn’t belong and begin making antibodies, which happens in natural infection against the novel coronavirus.
Researchers have been studying and working with messenger RNA vaccines for decades, according to the CDC.
Livesay, who’s been a pharmacist since 1984, knows being part of the COVID-19 vaccination effort will be a significant part of his career.
“We’ve done a lot of stuff over the years in the hospital to improve care and therapeutics and stuff like that; but this, by far, will probably be the biggest thing I ever have done or will do,” he said.
He’s looking forward to Friday.
“We’re ready for eight o’clock to get here in the morning,” he said. “We need to get moving on it. We’ve planned about as much as we can plan.”
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COVID-19 data through early Thursday, Dec. 17
Hancock County
- 708 new tests administered
- 95 new cases
- 12.8% seven-day (Dec. 4-10) positivity rate all tests, 7.4% cumulative rate
- 0 new deaths
- 56,568 total tests administered
- 30,998 individuals tested
- 4,331 total positive cases
- 23.3% seven-day (Dec. 4-10) positivity rate unique individuals, 14% cumulative rate
- 75 total deaths
Indiana
- 53,199 new tests administered (Aug. 25-Dec. 16), 16,962 new individuals tested
- 6,458 new cases (Nov. 28-Dec. 16)
- 12.4% seven-day (Dec. 4-10) positivity rate all tests, 7.9% cumulative rate
- 79 new deaths (Nov. 8-Dec. 16)
- 5,102,994 total tests administered
- 2,477,734 total individuals tested
- 447,190 total positive cases
- 24.5% seven-day (Dec. 4-10) positivity rate unique individuals, 18% cumulative rate
- 6,860 total deaths
- 320 total probable deaths
- 47.9% ICU beds in use – non-COVID
- 31.9% ICU beds in use – COVID
- 20.2% ICU beds available
- 16.5% ventilators in use – non-COVID
- 13.6% ventilators in use – COVID
- 69.9% ventilators available
- Hospital census: 3,147 total COVID-19 patients (2,747 confirmed, 400 under investigation)
Source: Indiana State Department of Health
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