Want a Covid-19 vaccine fast? Head to South Carolina, some residents say

Many county residents, frustrated by the shortage of doses and fragmented delivery system in their home state, travel south. A local health official says the main problem is lack of vaccines.

Cedar Mountain resident Bill Thomas, 93, pictured in 2019.

By Dan DeWitt

Bill Thomas was on his computer at the appointed time in mid-January, poised to sign up for a Covid-19 vaccination from Transylvania Public Health.

But first he was confronted by a form, which reappeared when he picked a time slot. “It wasn’t clear if I had to fill it out again,” he said, “and by the time I got fuddled around and straightened out, I could see the appointments on the screen disappearing before my eyes, ‘pum,’ ‘pum,’ ‘pum.’ ”

After all the slots had vanished, and after he made similarly fruitless attempts to book an appointment in nearby North Carolina counties, he and his wife, Shirl, followed the path of many other county residents in search of coronavirus vaccinations: They headed south.

On the morning of Jan. 28, they accessed the website of the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, said Thomas, 93, of Cedar Mountain. “We got an appointment that afternoon and, boom, went and did it.”

Such stories are common among Thomas’ neighbors such as Ruthie Zaleon, 72 -- who said she also promptly received an appointment and shot last week in Greenville -- and are lighting up social media. A message on Nextdoor from a Connestee Falls resident about the frustration of trying to book an appointment in Transylvania generated 63 comments, many of them echoing the original post and decrying the inability to access a waiting list.

Some commenters said they found slots in Henderson or Buncombe counties. Many others touted the speed and convenience of the appointment process in South Carolina.

Actually, the main problem locally isn’t the process, said Tara Rybka, the Public Health spokeswoman. It’s a simple shortage of vaccines.

“This week we received 200 doses and we have approximately 9,000 people in Transylvania County who are eligible to receive one. The supply is just not keeping up with demand,” she said.

While the minimum age for vaccination in South Carolina is 70, in North Carolina it is 65, and in Transylvania 30 percent of the population is 65 or older.

In the previous two weeks, Rybka said, her department received no doses from the state, which diverted much of its supply to recent mass inoculation events at the Charlotte Motor Speedway and in that city’s Bank of America Stadium.

“The state’s justification of course is that we can give a whole lot of vaccines really quickly this way . . . and get our numbers up in comparison to other states,” she said.

But the mandate to local departments is not only to promptly administer doses, but to distribute them to underserved groups, which is why her department offered inoculations this week in the remote mountain community of Balsam Grove.

That round of 200 shots should bring the total delivered by Public Health to more than 1,700. The department also expects to receive 200 doses in each of the next two weeks. Interested residents can visit the department’s Covid-19 information page, and learn how to sign up to be alerted for the next, sure-to-be-brief, window for booking appointments.

For its most recent round of vaccinations, the county opened the sign-up portal at 1 p.m. Monday, she said, and “all 200 appointments were gone in under three minutes.”

Waiting lists are impractical for the small group of very busy Public Health workers, requiring them to send notifications to residents on the list, she said. “It moves the workload from the public to the staff of the health department.”

And because people can and do place their names on multiple lists -- and would likely be served at another location by the time their turn arrived in Transylvania -- much of that effort would be wasted.

The department received most of its doses directly from the state, though the 500 shots it delivered at a drive-through session in Rosman came from Mission Health, owner of Transylvania Regional Hospital, which separately has received doses for frontline healthcare workers on its staff.

 Also receiving vaccines from the state is Blue Ridge Health-Brevard Health Center, which was the source of doses recently administered at Brevard Music Center.

CVS and Walgreens have been awarded allotments directly from the federal government, though so far these have gone to residents of long-term care facilities. A total of 2,848 shots from all sources have been administered in the county, according to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services website.

Pharmacies will soon start offering inoculations to the general public, which is one reason Rybka expects the pace of vaccinations to increase in the coming weeks.

Vaccine manufacturers Pfizer and Moderna are both scaling up production, and a new, one-dose vaccine from Johnson & Johnson is nearing approval from the federal government.

South Carolina’s public health services are centralized, the appointment system is uniform across the state, and it’s site-locator includes all distributors of the vaccine -- hospitals, public health clinics and pharmacies.

It does not exactly encourage out-of-state residents to tap into its allotment of shots but does allow “non-permanent residents” of the state to be vaccinated, which includes people who work in South Carolina but live elsewhere, according to an emailed response to a query from NewsBeat.

It also does not currently require proof of state residency to receive a shot, the email said, and 4,750 of the 400,000 shots it had delivered by the beginning of this week had gone to North Carolina residents, and nearly 7,000 more went to people with “unlisted” addresses.

Thomas said the fragmented system in his home state, where sign-up protocols differ from county to county, is particularly hard on older, not-so-tech-savvy residents.

“It’s every man for himself … and a lot of people are going to be left out,” he said. “If you’ve got your 12-year-old grandson handy, you’re in good shape.”

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