A COVID-19 vaccine is estimated to be available to the general public in Hattiesburg in several months when Phase 2 begins, a Hub City medical official told Mayor Toby Barker during an interview recently.
Barker has extended the current city mandate on masks and business restrictions through Jan. 16 in hopes of alleviating the number of hospitalizations that are affecting area facilities.
Dr. Bryan Batson, CEO of Hattiesburg Clinic, said setting a timeline for distribution of vaccines is difficult to determine or even guess.
“But, I'll give you my best stab at it,” he said. “We know that the health care facilities have not all been given vaccines yet. As best I understand from the Department of Health, they will probably not be in until late January or February. So, while we have plenty of doctors and nurses who were anxiously awaiting the ability to get in line for the maximum degree, it will still be weeks before that is made available to us at Hattiesburg Clinic for those people who don't see patients in the hospital.”
Batson said Phase 2 will include the higher-risk middle population with elderly population.
“The best we understand at this point, it would be late spring early summer,” he said. “So, we're several months still before its vaccine is made available to the general public.
Batson said one thing about the Phase 1 program has been the technology of the vaccine.
“I think the thing that's really important to understand is the technology that has been using this vaccine has been around for 10 years and has been studied a lot,” he said. “Certainly, this has been a more rapid cycle, but part of that was because of the technology being able to produce vaccine in a more rapid fashion.”
Batson also said people should understand the vaccine was being manufactured while all while the clinical trials were being done.
“We didn't have to wait for the clinical trials to be done,” he said. “Then the vaccines start developing after that, so that helped escalate this availability significant hundreds of thousands of patients have been volunteered in these trials. We owe them a great debt of gratitude for participating in the research and have gotten great news from that research.”
Barker said the full effect of crowded hospitals won’t be apparent until two weeks after holidays.
“Similar to Thanksgiving, the total impact of Christmas gatherings will not be seen for two to three weeks when it comes to hospitalizations and when it comes to new infections,” he said. “We're looking at the end of November, leading up to Thanksgiving. We were in that high 60s and low 70s hospitalization-wise Then over the course of two or three weeks following Thanksgiving, we really saw that number jumped well above 70 on to 100 and then for a couple days over 110. We hope that we don't see those kinds of increases; if we see those kinds of increases, you're going to take a very taxed health care system to really push it to the limit. We hope that folks make wise decisions when it can't wait comes to who they spend time with wearing masks.”
Barker said the New Year’s Eve celebration on Front Street was changed to a virtual display to avert increasing the number of hospitalizations down the line.
“This is not a decision that we took lightly; it's not a decision that was easy,” he said. “However, since this pandemic began, we've tried to make decisions based on the advice of healthcare professionals based on numbers that we've seen locally and understanding that we're already above 100 hospitalizations.
“We don't need to bring a bunch of people into one small space downtown and have a big party even though this has become something that Hattiesburg has been known for. This is an event that our administration helped kick off with a lot of people.”