Peace Harbor to Work with Lane County on Vaccines
Peace Harbor hospital in Florence will now act as a vaccination liaison for Lane County Public Health. According to the hospital’s operations Director Cheri Payne the hospitals allocated doses for the coronavirus will be distributed to those on the LaneCounty.org registration site.
“We get a list from Lane County and we will be administering those vaccines here in our clinic.”
Payne says currently they are getting 100 doses per week from the county and they expect, as more vaccinations become available, there will be more sent to Peace Harbor. Dr. Willie Foster says there is a good chance that more mass vaccination clinics are headed our way.
“it is highly likely that there will be some more mass vaccinations events and the best way to have that happen is if Lane County sees a couple of thousand people signed up.
Foster also said that he believes that the Florence area could be vaccinated as early as the beginning of summer if the vaccination doses continue to roll out as expected.
Advanced Life Support Unit Goes Into Service
Siuslaw Valley Fire and Rescue have placed an Advanced Life Support Engine into service. The Notice from Chief Michael Schick yesterday means the availability to provide advanced life support prior to an ambulance arriving on scene. Firefighter Colton Griswold was recently certified as a paramedic for the Fire District, and although the capability will be limited, SVFR hopes to increase the number of firefighters with paramedic credentials. Operations Chief Matt House says they would also like to have as many paramedics trained as possible in fire training which will hopefully lead to their certification by the State of Oregon Firefighters. Currently the two entities, WLAD and SVFR share a fire and EMS chief, but the agencies continue to operate as separate units.
Low Case Numbers Continue
Lane County posted another 12 cases of the coronavirus yesterday. Cases continue to be on the decline and are just over the 50 per 100,000 mark that would enable the county to move to the low risk category. Health officials say this is the time to buckle down and keep up the guidelines that got us to this point. Dr. Willie Foster with Peace Harbor hospital says vaccinations and safety practices that the OHA and CDC recommend are the best way to return to some sort of normalcy
“I think their guidelines of slowly relaxing restrictions is really the way to go because you can keep an eye on what’s happening and if need be and hopefully not move back in the other direction.
The governor announced a reprieve for counties that may move back up on the risk level chart vowing not to re-close things until a second two weeks establishes which direction a county is truly going. For Florence there were no new cases reported yesterday.
22 Deaths Reported
The state of Oregon announced 22 new deaths related to the coronavirus in their daily report yesterday bringing the state total to 2,346. There were also 267 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed. The state is inching close to 2 million total vaccine doses. There is no current tally on administered doses due to a server outage on state’s immunization information system.
