Local health officials continue to allocate H1N1 swine flu vaccine to medical providers as it becomes available, ordering all the doses they can whenever they can.
“Vaccine continues to come at least weekly to the region, and more recently, we’ve been getting a chance to order a couple of times a week,” said John Wiesman, executive director of Clark County Public Health.
“We find out on a daily basis if we can order vaccine or not. We always order the maximum we can,” Wiesman said. “It is getting out to the communities. The supplies still are not enough, and everybody is frustrated with that. We’re frustrated, and the manufacturers are frustrated.”
So far, Southwest Washington’s Region 4 — Clark, Skamania, Cowlitz and Wahkiakum counties and the Cowlitz Tribe — has received 32,610 doses of the vaccine. Clark County has received 26,710 doses.
County public health agencies determine where the shipments go, Wiesman said.
“At public health sites alone, through this morning, we’d given out 10,396 doses across the four counties,” he said.
It’s much more difficult to tabulate the number of people who’ve been hit with swine flu, because it shares several symptoms with many other illnesses.
There are some indicators that can reflect the scope of the outbreak, however.
From Sept. 21 through Monday morning, there have been 67 hospitalizations in Clark County due to laboratory-confirmed influenza, Wiesman said.
“No fatalities have been reported so far in Clark County,” he said.
Local school districts also have been keeping a close eye on attendance figures. A school considers it significant when 10 percent of the student body is absent because of a common set of symptoms, and Clark County’s biggest districts indicate that the outbreak is leveling off.
Battle Ground administrator Jane Mercier said, “We’re still seeing an increase in absenteeism of students with flu-like symptoms, but, overall, not much change in the past week or two.”
Mercier said the district continues to urge parents whose children are absent with flu-like symptoms to keep them home until they have been symptom-free for 24 hours.
Evergreen’s latest districtwide absence rate was at 6.6 percent.
“We’re actually way down,” said Evergreen spokeswoman Carol Fenstermacher. “Right now, knock on wood, it’s relatively quiet.
“Even when we were seeing larger numbers, it wasn’t necessarily the flu” that was making students sick, she added.
Vancouver had 13 schools on its “10 percent” list Monday — all elementaries or middle schools. But some schools came off that list when absences fell below the 10 percent threshold, spokeswoman Kris Sork said.
Tom Vogt: 360-735-4558 or tom.vogt@columbian.com
