In Oregon, very few nursing home residents have gotten this year’s COVID-19 booster, according to the Oregon Health Authority.
Communicable disease supervisor Jill Johnson draws out doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine at the Deschutes County Public Health Department in Bend, Ore., Tuesday, Jan. 12, 2021.
Bradley W. Parks / OPB
The updated vaccines are targeted at XBB 1.5, an omicron subvariant whose close relatives have been detected in recent Oregon samples.
However, the most current state data from October showed that at long-term care facilities, only 6% of staff and 11% of residents had gotten this booster.
“The residents who live there are at particularly high risk,” said Dr. Dat Tran, the medical director for Healthcare Associated Infections at the OHA. “And the staff who work with them who care for them can transmit COVID-19, so it’s important for them to be vaccinated also.”
Tran said facilities face limited access to the booster, as they generally lack vaccine clinics on-site. Data from individual locations can be accessed through Oregon’s COVID dashboards.
“There’s much more reliance on attending pharmacies and getting the vaccine on an individual level,” said Tran. “During the pandemic, there was a much more coordinated effort to get vaccines to the facilities.”
Nationwide, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a similarly low rate in early October, with 9% of nursing home residents found up-to-date on their COVID-19 vaccinations.
However, that figure nearly doubled by around a month later. Data on that time period is not yet publicly available for Oregon.
Tran said the OHA’s vaccination toolkits could help nursing homes increase access. In the meantime, he said the public should consider getting boosted before family gatherings this holiday season.
Less than 9% of all Oregon residents are up-to-date, according to the most recent data from the OHA.