Avula: Introduction of statewide pre-registration system should improve COVID-19 vaccination process

For the next few days, Virginians who are eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine but who haven’t yet pre-registered for it won’t be able to do so.

That’s because the Virginia Department of Health is implementing a new statewide pre-registration system that will replace the individual systems created by local health districts statewide (which are extensions of the VDH) and is shutting down the local systems in order to gather, sort and de-duplicate all existing information and then load it into the new system.

The new version will take effect at 8 a.m. Tuesday everywhere except in the state’s largest locality, Fairfax County, which has opted to continue using its own system.

Once the system is online, people will be able to access it through their local health districts’ websites just as they’ve been accessing the existing forms, said Virginia’s COVID-19 vaccine coordinator Danny Avula during a Friday teleconference with state reporters. Henrico and Richmond residents will be able to find the new form at http://vax.rchd.com.

Officials hope the new system – and a new 750-person statewide call center that’s also coming online soon – will streamline the pre-registration process, improve communication between citizens and the health department and provide an easier way for Virginians to find answers – from real people – to their COVID and vaccine-related questions.

The new plans also should relieve some burdens felt by local health districts by directing questions from the public to the call center (which will be able to address callers in more than 100 languages) and by providing an email confirmation and weekly email updates to each person who pre-registers, said Avula, who’s also Henrico’s health director.

Local health districts have been inundated with questions from people wondering whether their pre-registration forms were accepted and asking why they haven’t heard from anyone several weeks after completing the forms. Most districts didn’t have systems in place that sent email confirmations.

More than 117,000 people in Henrico and Richmond who are eligible in Phases 1A and the first portion of 1B have completed interest forms to date, and about 45,000 of them have not yet received their first doses, because the Richmond and Henrico Health Districts jointly receive only about 6,300 in total each week.

The new system will not change the way local health districts prioritize those within their jurisdictions who sign up, Avula said. Local officials will continue to make those decisions, as they have for the past two months.

Vaccine boost could arrive within 3 weeks

State officials scrambled to implement the new system and staff and train call center operators after local districts felt the crush of pre-registrations following the state’s decision to open Phase 1B to seniors 65 and older (extending the category that had been planned initially for those 75 and older). The move followed guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

But Avula said that state officials always had planned to roll out a statewide system – they just figured they’d have more time to do it.

“We certainly were planning on a more coordinated process, but later,” he said. “At the beginning of the rollout, we didn’t expect to be in Phase 1B until February.”

The decision to expand that group to those 65 and older doubled the potential size of the group, he said “and the need for these solutions accelerated and became more complicated.”

Virginia is receiving about 130,000 doses of vaccine each week from the federal government, while CVS is receiving another 26,000 for use at 36 of its stores within the state.

White House officials announced Tuesday that the federal government would begin distributing 11 million doses weekly next week – up from 8.6 million three weeks ago – but it’s unclear how many more doses might be coming to Virginia.

The federal government also will begin sending doses next week directly to 250 community health centers nationwide, as a way to reach a higher percentage of uninsured, minority and at-risk people, though Avula said none of the centers is in Virginia. But, he said, Virginia centers should be added to the list in the next week or two as the program expands ultimately to serve all 1,300 such centers nationally.

Within three weeks or one month, it’s likely that a number of other Virginia retailers, such as Walgreens, Walmart and Publix, will begin offering vaccinations, Avula said.

He expects the state to begin receiving doses of a third vaccine – from Johnson & Johnson – perhaps as soon as the first week of March, assuming it earns emergency-use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration Feb. 26 as expected.

By April, most Americans should be able to find vaccine doses if they want them, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci said earlier this week.

On Friday, Avula described how challenging it’s been for state and local health officials to determine how to prioritize a few thousand people each week for the vaccine from lists that include tens of thousands. There’s no algorithm, he said, to determine whether a younger person who’s recovering from cancer should be vaccinated before an older person, for example.

“We’ve never really been in a place where we’ve had to ratio a scarce resource, and functionally that’s where we are right now,” he said. “We have a very scare [amount] of vaccine, a very large number of people who want it.”

Unlike the CVS registration system – which opened earlier this week in Virginia to much concussion, and which allows people to register at any available location in the state regardless of where they live – the new statewide system will only allow people to register for doses from their own localities, Avula said.