Good Shepherd Health Care System helped vaccinate Umatilla County’s first round of senior citizens on Friday, Feb. 12, after Oregonians age 80 and up became eligible earlier that week.

Caitlin Cozad, communications director for Good Shepherd, said preliminary numbers for the day were 226 first doses and 340 second doses given at the hospital that day. Those numbers were added to other vaccination clinics in the county, including vaccinations given by appointment at Mirasol Family Health Center in Hermiston and opportunities in Pendleton and Milton-Freewater.

While people waiting in line for a chance to receive a first dose of the vaccine did not need an appointment, there were a few no-shows for second-dose appointments scheduled at Good Shepherd on Friday, which Cozad said may have been due to the snowy roads.

“We are being proactive by contacting individuals that are due for their booster (second vaccination),” she wrote in an email. “Most have showed for their booster, but there is a small percentage of community members that did not show, and we believe it may have been due to the inclement weather at the time.”

The doses given to Good Shepherd were part of Umatilla County’s allocation, although Cozad said since the hospital also covers Morrow County, if a Morrow County resident who fit all the eligibility requirements had come in they would not have been turned away. Morrow County has been receiving its own allocations, however, and created a sign-up sheet to contact residents when vaccine doses become available for them.

Good Shepherd and Umatilla County Public Health currently do not have a waitlist members of the public can sign up for if they were not able to get an appointment for the week. In its first week of offering scheduled appointments for residents age 80 and up, the county ran out of appointments about an hour after the phone line to make them first opened. This week, first dose appointments for a clinic in Pendleton also filled up quickly after becoming available the morning of Monday, Feb. 15.

Vials of the Moderna vaccine contain 10 to 11 doses, so once a vial is opened, the hospital must use all the doses within six hours. In those cases, when there are not enough eligible people on site to use up all the doses, Cozad said the hospital “attempts to contact those that are eligible” but did not specify how they find those people, other than that they have been coordinating with Umatilla County Public Health on vaccine distribution.

To date, she said, only one dose of the vaccine has expired before it was used.

“Our primary goal is to assist Umatilla County Public Health as much as we can,” she said. “The more vaccines we deliver, the sooner we can get to the goal of 75% (or more) of Umatilla County vaccinated.”

Oregonians age 75 and up became eligible on Feb. 15, and Oregonians age 70 and up will be added to the eligibility list on Feb. 22, with those 65 and up added on March 1. The state has decided that people with underlying health conditions that make them more vulnerable to COVID-19 and frontline workers “essential to the functioning of society” will be next in line but has not yet specified when they will become eligible or what conditions or jobs will be included in the initial list.

For more information, visit covidvaccine.oregon.gov, call 211 with questions and watch the Umatilla County Public Health and Morrow County Public Health Facebook pages for announcements of new vaccine clinics and appointments, which are often announced on Fridays and open for signups on Monday mornings.