By Rich Larson, News Director
Yesterday an FDA Advisory Panel signed off on Pfizer’s vaccine against Covid-19, clearing the way for an approval that could come as soon as today.
Northfield Hospital & Clinics President & CEO Steve Underdahl said the hospital staff, working closely with the Health Department, has been planning for the new vaccine and they are ready. He said the logistics of a vaccine rollout are difficult on a federal, state and local level, but he and the rest of the medical community are feeling optimistic that this is a light at the end of the tunnel.
The vaccine itself is difficult to store since it must be kept at –94 degrees Fahrenheit. Underdahl said that the hospital has acquired a deep-freeze freezer on loan from the University of Minnesota, and they will be able to store the vaccine on-site.
The expectations are that NHC will receive the vaccine the week of December 21st, and the first people to be vaccinated will be health care workers and residents of long-term care facilities.
Having a vaccine available, however isn’t enough. For it to work, people must be vaccinated, which is not a universally embraced concept. Underdahl said that he knows that there is “a certain amount of trepidation around something that is new,” and it might take a little time for people to understand what the vaccine does and how it works, and he included health care workers in that group. But he said he expects the percentage of people in the medical community who embrace the vaccine will be very high. And for those who want to do their own research on the vaccine, he recommended that they find a credible source of information.
“Don’t get your information about your health from Facebook. Juts don’t do it. Find a source of information that you trust. Ultimately people have to make decisions for themselves and their families, and I respect that. But I am really concerned about the prevalence of so much misinformation, and stuff that’s just outright crazy.”
Underdahl emphasized the fact that matters of public health should never be debated as politics, and he hoped that people would see the vaccine as an important tool in the fight against Covid-19.
Our full conversation with Steve Underdahl can be heard HERE.
School district participates in pilot testing program
Meanwhile, the Northfield Public School District has partnered with the Minnesota Department of Health on a pilot program that they hope will help slow the spread of the Coronavirus.
Superintendent Dr. Matt Hillmann said that the district is one of the first to work with the Health Department in searching for people who have contracted the disease but are asymptomatic. In what could be characterized as a voluntary, random testing program, District staff students and families are invited to be tested – regardless of whether they feel sick or not – at the middle school on Wednesday. The initial program has provided for testing for three consecutive weeks. Last week, Dr. Hillmann said, they were able to test 480 individuals. This past Wednesday, they tested 511 people. There will be another round of testing next Wednesday, December 16, from 1-7pm.
The idea behind this, said Dr. Hillmann, is to see if this is something that could be done on a regular basis in school districts across the state, in order to discover people who may be unknowingly spreading the virus.
“Asymptomatic folks are really a pretty major engine of how this virus is spreading. So, if our students and our families and our staff are feeling great, they can come – they can come if they’re not feeling great too – but this partnership is to say ‘Let’s test as many asymptomatic people as we reasonably can. If they find that they are positive we get them to isolate at home, and that prevents them from spreading the virus to people unknowingly. Nobody wants to spread this, and even more so unknowingly.”
Dr. Hillmann also said that students, families and staff at Prairie Creek, Arcadia and St. Dominic’s have also been invited to participate in the program.
The conversation with Dr. Hillmann can be heard HERE.
Work Continues in Rice County courts despite shutdown
And Rice County Attorney John Fossum said that the Covid-19 shutdown has once again created a backlog in the county’s trial schedule.
With the order from State Supreme Court Chief Justice Lorie Gildea that no in-person court hearings happen until at least February 1st, there are some 115 court cases in Rice County that still need to be put on the calendar, let alone the number of cases that were already scheduled that have been postponed.
He said hearings are still happening via zoom, and judges are working every day. First and second appearances are taking place, but trials cannot move forward. While the County Courthouse was shut down this past spring. a new Covid-19 safe courtroom was constructed in the government services building, able to accommodate – and physically distance – all essential personnel of a jury trial, plus a witness. However, Fossum said, that courtroom has still yet to see a full trial.
“We had one case that started, a jury trial that went for a couple of days, and then somebody in the court staff or jury was exposed to Covid, and the judge declared a mistrial after three days and that one was re-calendared into January, so it will have to be re-calendared again to another time. We had another case that was about to go to trial, and that one was settled on the Friday before.”
Fossum said most of his staff is working remotely, but everyone has plenty of work to do. In fact, he said, Rice County has seen an uptick in charged crimes since Thanksgiving, which only continues to add to the case surplus.
“There is always work to do,” he said. “Just not like it’s been done in the first 26 years of my career.”
The conversation with County Attorney Fossum can be heard HERE.
