University Hospital in Newark will resume vaccinations Wednesday morning after being snowed out for two days.
The hospital has been vaccinating up to 600 people a day, said the CEO, Dr. Shereef Elnahal, and has been able to reschedule everyone who was supposed to have gotten their shots Monday or Tuesday.
He also said the hospital has ways of helping those who might have a hard time making an appointment. “We’ve had both a digital option and a phone scheduling option for that reason,” he said, “and we also have bilingual services in both our advertisements and in interacting with our patients. We do English and Spanish. We want to be able to add more languages. There’s a high Portuguese-speaking population in Newark.”
He said the hospital has been using up 70% to 90% of its supply before each new shipment arrives. Elnahal said the state Health Department’s allocations have been sufficient.
“They are tracking utilization rate carefully, and rewarding the sites that are efficient by giving them more and more stock,” he said, “because they are clearly able to efficiently deliver it into arms, and so I know that’s a dynamic that’s recently kicked in.”
Elnahal said the vaccine they have on hand will hold up even with the delay. “If it’s just a couple of days that should not be an inventory risk really because both vaccines do require some degree of cold storage and they’re good for quite some time,” he said, “so we’re not worried about that, we’re worried about folks getting vaccinated who expected to this week, but so far we’ve been able to reschedule everybody.”