California county forced to deliver hundreds of emergency Covid vaccines after freezer power outage
Alarm designed to alert staff power failures malfunctioned, president of Adventist Health in Mendocino County says
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Your support makes all the difference.Officials in the northern California county of Mendocino were forced to distribute emergency coronavirus shots after a power outage affected a freezer holding the county's supply of the Moderna coronavirus vaccine, reports said.
An outage at a medical centre in Mendocino County on Monday meant health care workers had to distribute all 830 doses of the jab before the shots thawed and became spoiled, The Mendocino Voice first reported.
Judson Howe, president of Adventist Health in the county, confirmed to CBS News that a power failure had occurred around 11.30am in the Adventist Health Ukiah Valley Medical Center in the city of Ukiah.
An alarm designed to alert staff to power failures on the freezer malfunctioned, so the vaccine either had started to thaw or could have thawed, the broadcaster said.
To make sure the vaccines did not go to waste, the hospital reportedly spread the word of an emergency distribution plan and called in staffers to give shots at the hospital and some clinics.
Patients and residents quickly queued at the hospital to accept the emergency shots and the doses were administered within two hours, Mr Howe reportedly said.
Some of the doses were sent off to a local nursing home to be administered, he added.
The two-dose Moderna vaccine, developed by US biotech firm Moderna, is almost 95 per cent effective in preventing symptomatic Covid-19 and needs to be stored at fridge temperature.
The lower temperature requirement for the Moderna shot differs from the Pfizer vaccine which needs to be stored and transported at -70C.
Information was collected from those who received a vaccine so that they can be called at a future date for their booster shot.
Mendocino county has recorded 2,663 cases of the novel coronavirus since the outbreak began with 297 active confirmed cases and 31 deaths reported, according to the government website.
Statewide, California posted a new single-day record for coronavirus cases on Monday, recording more than 74,000 cases, according to a tally by The Los Angeles Times.
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