I’m not easily surprised these days, because…everything. But I just stumbled across an astonishing bit of data. Apparently only about 46% of nursing home staff have received a COVID-19 vaccine booster shot, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Residents are doing better, but at less than 70% the rate is still disturbingly low.
The fact that I was so shocked perhaps illustrates the scope of the challenge. I spend considerable time reading, thinking and writing about this stuff, and even I was pretty much oblivious. As waves of cases continue, the nation and its highly stubborn and distractable people seem intent on ignoring the pandemic and hoping it goes away. But within senior care, I had foolishly thought it was different.
The first roll-out of the vaccines was such an exhilarating time for the profession. I was in a long-term care pharmacy that day in December of 2020 when those first white boxes filled with icy vials of hope arrived on a Fed Ex truck, and I’ll never forget the emotion we felt to be part of the life-saving effort.
It was all such a sparkling success that maybe we became complacent. If the pandemic is a horror movie, while we’ve been patting ourselves on the back for our early vaccination successes and moving on, the killer with the chainsaw is still hiding on the porch, regaining strength.
Actually, maybe it’s not so much complacency as sheer exhaustion at the thought of having to repeat all that pro-vaccination persuasion with our residents and staff. It was hard enough to get folks to get a shot once, and then twice. Now that it’s three going on more, beating our heads all over again against the wall of misinformation, politics and a misguided sense of personal liberty would require resources and will that seem in perilously short supply.
Without mandates to lean on, I’m not sure how we’ll get those full vaccination numbers back up. There’s something weirdly off in people’s risk/reward calculous right now, and I’ve even felt it myself. At my advanced age, I’m eligible for jab number four, but since I’ve been unpleasantly sick after every shot, it’s hard to make myself do it when I know I’ll feel horrible again. Even though the long-term benefits are clear intellectually, it’s a surprisingly challenging personal decision.
I was thinking about this while sitting in the torture chair at the dentist this week. It was just a simple cleaning, but there are few things in life I hate worse, and I’d been putting it off even though I’m well aware the procedure is much preferable to a mouth full of dentures. Similarly, maybe a seatbelt chafes my neck, but I’d rather buckle up than fly through the windshield, and the unpleasantness of colonoscopy prep is still better than cancer. But often, against all evidence and experience, we’re strangely reluctant to take simple steps in the present to protect ourselves from far greater potential future harm. It’s all pretty baffling and disappointing.
Maybe the most useful motivator would be to simply encourage staff to look around them and see how sick their friends, family and co-workers are still getting. Many who get infected without being boosted don’t suffer much, it’s true — but many, many do. Perhaps we should install some sort of virtual reality COVID-19 simulation chamber in every facility, like they use in astronaut training, where hesitant residents and staff could experience what a full-blown COVID-19 infection feels like without actually going there.
Finally, a positive use for the metaverse.
Things I Think is written by Gary Tetz, a two-time national Silver Medalist and three-time regional Gold and Silver Medal winner in the Association of Business Press Editors (ASBPE) awards program, as well as an Award of Excellence honoree in the APEX Awards. He’s been amusing, inspiring, informing and sometimes befuddling long-term care readers worldwide since the end of a previous century. He is a writer and video producer for Consonus Healthcare Services in Portland, OR.
The opinions expressed in McKnight’s Long-Term Care News guest submissions are the author’s and are not necessarily those of McKnight’s Long-Term Care News or its editors.
