State, Whatcom health officials prepare for expected approval of pediatric COVID vaccine
On the brink of a next wave of COVID-19 vaccine approvals, this time for children, state Department of Health officials said Wednesday, Oct. 27, that first doses could be given out as soon as next week.
Pfizer-BioNTech won first-round approval Tuesday, Oct. 26, for COVID-19 vaccines for children ages 5 to 11, with a Food and Drug Administration vaccine advisory board recommending a low-dose Pfizer vaccine for emergency use.
The process now goes forward to seek FDA authorization, along with guidance from the CDC Advisory Committee, meeting Nov. 2-3, and then CDC recommendation for a rollout. After that, the Western State scientific safety review workgroup will also meet in the final step for Washington and Western states.
“This means vaccines for kids aged five to 11 could happen as soon as the end of next week,” said Michele Roberts, acting assistant secretary for the state DOH.
“We’ve already started planning to ensure vaccines will be available to Washington as soon as they’re authorized,” she added, noting that while pediatric doses have not yet been sent to states, the state has submitted its first orders.
Because the pediatric version comes in a different vial, allocations will have to be administered. The federal government has allocated 230,000 initial doses for the state. Retail pharmacies in the state enrolled in the federal vaccine program are also set to receive about 80,000 initial doses.
The state’s population of five- to 11-year-olds is about 680,000, according to Roberts.
Whatcom County has 17,820 residents between the ages of 5 and 11, Whatcom County Co-Health Officer Dr. Greg Thompson told the Whatcom County Council during their meeting Tuesday. Once that age group is able to receive the vaccine, Thompson said the Whatcom County Health Department is anticipating demand to be approximately 275 doses per day, based on the uptick it saw once teens were able to be vaccinated.
The dose will be mild: a third of the strength administered in the current vaccine for those 12 and older, given in two doses separated by three weeks.
“The federal government has indicated they will start shipping those to the state after FDA has issued the emergency use authorization,” allowing for the state to get ready for distribution, Roberts added.
Schools and new quarantine rules coming
Getting children vaccinated as quickly as possible is a priority. More pediatric cases were seen as the school year got rolling, and the state’s battle with the Delta wave didn’t help.
“We have a very high level of community transmission, and it was even higher during the months of August and September,” said Lacy Fehrenbach, deputy Secretary for COVID-19 Response for the state DOH.
“We’ve seen over the course of the pandemic that outbreaks among school-aged students correlates directly with the amount of disease in the community. So we would expect to see a high number of introductions into the school environment and a higher risk for outbreaks in schools.”
As of Wednesday, the Bellingham, Blaine, Lynden, Meridian and Mount Baker school districts had reported 373 cases of staff and students during the 2021-22 school year through their online dashboards. The Ferndale School District reports the number cases in the past week, but not a total number for the school year, while the Nooksack Valley School District has not yet reported cases on its website.
The 373 cases also does not include a large outbreak at Lynden Christian of at least 48 COVID cases that forced the school to close Sept. 29 for two weeks.
Between the five Whatcom school districts that are reporting, The Bellingham Herald’s analysis found that approximately 17.2 cases per 1,000 students have been reported so far this school year, based on enrollment numbers supplied by the Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction.
Fehrenbach noted that the median case number for school outbreaks has been five cases, which she said is a testament to schools’ layered prevention approach.
She added that DOH would soon be updating its quarantine guidance for schools, with a “preference for the shortened quarantine option,” of seven days with testing after five days or later.
“We will be requiring schools to offer families the seven day with negative test on day five or later quarantine option so that students can return to class more quickly,” she said.
“Additionally, for those schools that have a Test to Stay option, we are going to encourage use of that,” so essentially frequent testing is a “modified quarantine,” where students are allowed “even if they’re a close contact to continue going to school for classroom instruction only,” she said.
If families choose not to test, then the school would use one of the longer quarantine options — 10 or 14 days.
Those who are fully vaccinated do not have to quarantine if they have no symptoms, Fehrenbach added.
While the full school outbreak report will come later this week, she released preliminary numbers Wednesday:
There were a total of 189 COVID-19 outbreaks reported in the state’s K-12 schools Aug. 1-Sept. 30, with 42 of those outbreaks occurring in August and 147 in September.
The outbreaks added up to 1,284 associated cases in August and September.
Current trends
Amid expanding vaccination levels in the state, including the recent addition of booster doses for Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson recipients, COVID’s fifth wave is still claiming victims.
Scott Lindquist, state epidemiologist for communicable diseases for the state DOH, said the state’s epi curve trendline “really shows us that the disease is not slowing down.”
Some of the spread is coming from people moving indoors with the changing weather, he noted. “People are loosening up their masking behaviors, and then the hesitancy or refusal to vaccinate, multiple outbreaks — all of these are contributing to us stalling out at a fairly high rate.”
“It is concerning we’re this high and we’re starting to slow down,” he said, referring to the pace of declining cases.
Apart from that, the total state population is still just 59.9% fully vaccinated. That number has climbed above 70% for those 12 and older.
In Whatcom County, 61.6% of the population is vaccinated, according to state data, while the Whatcom County Health Department reports that 50.3% of residents ages 12 and 17 are fully vaccinated.
Lindquist said if the state were to reach some type of “community immunity,” estimates now go beyond the 80% to 90% vaccination rate needed to offset areas of the state with low vaccine rates,
“The state is not entirely equal with its vaccine coverage. And so it will actually probably take quite a bit more than that 80%,” he said.
Whatcom children and COVID
Whatcom County has seen a recent increase in cases and hospitalizations among its youngest residents during the delta surge.
During his presentation to the county council on Tuesday, Thompson said that the county has had 11 children hospitalized with COVID-related symptoms, including four within the past week.
For the pandemic, age-range data published by the Washington State Department of Health Monday showed that Whatcom County has had 24 COVID-related hospitalizations in residents under age 20 during the pandemic, which accounted for 3% of the county’s 799 hospitalizations included in the report.
“Since Whatcom County has a very high level of COVID-19 transmission right now, and given the national trends, pediatric hospitalizations are expected but still very troubling,” health department spokesperson Melissa Morin told The Herald in an email. “The best ways to protect our community’s young children is for families to get all their eligible members vaccinated and to keep their sick kids at home.”
The Herald’s analysis of the age-range data also showed that Whatcom residents under the age of 20 had an infection rate of 244 cases per 100,000 residents — highest among any age group, continuing a trend seen the past six weeks. For the pandemic, the report showed Whatcom’s youngest age group has accounted for nearly a quarter of all cases in the county (3,926 of 16,191 total cases).
“We have not had any deaths in Whatcom County, thankfully, in children due to COVID,” Thompson told the County Council.
