Plenty for Utah businesses to do as vaccine rollout begins

By Brice Wallace

With COVID-19 vaccines on their way from manufacturers to states and eventually people’s arms, health officials are urging the business community to prepare.

At a recent webinar sponsored by the Salt Lake Chamber’s Roadmap to Recovery Coalition, those officials said companies can help the situation by becoming approved to be vaccination locations; encouraging their employees and customers to get the vaccination; and continuing to implement social distancing, mask-wearing and sanitization.

Rich Saunders, executive director of the Utah Department of Health, and Rich Lakin, immunization program manager for the department, laid out a timeline for vaccinations. The first groups to be given them are hospital personnel, and staff and residents at long-term care facilities. All healthcare workers, first responders and other essential workers should receive the vaccine by late January and early February. By the April-through-June period, the vaccine likely will be available to anyone who wants it.

By July, “we are pretty darn close to where we have reached at least 50 to 60 percent of the population that would want to receive it” in the 18-and-older population,” Lakin said.

“The vaccine is going to drive the response. If we have enough vaccine, we can roll it out to our partners as quickly as possible. If we don’t have enough vaccine, then we may have to be a little bit more strategic” and ensure that people over age 65 and other hard-hit populations are high priorities, he said.

“I think that the main thing, as we think of the business community and we move into that April time frame when all of Utahns have that opportunity, I think we need to understand that without a vaccine, this [current situation] could be a way of life.”

Businesses and their employees and customers should be vaccinated, he urged.

“If we can reach a certain level — and I don’t know what that level is yet — we can actually get this thing under control and we can get back to what we’ve seen in the past,” Lakin said.

Saunders used an analogy of a bridge: Until vaccinations are widespread, all parts of society should work together to “cross the bridge” to get to that goal. For businesses, that means encouraging patrons and employees to wear masks, sanitizing surfaces and continuing physical distancing.

“Any of those types of basic, well-known behaviors that we could have in businesses would be very, very crucial,” Saunders said.

“The vaccines will start, but they won’t take the real effect that we need for months. So in the meantime, it’s this walking across the bridge together safely and implementing whatever behaviors and practices that we can that will cause these case counts to not take off greater than what they are.”

Saunders also called upon businesses to become as vaccination locations, which requires authorization. “The more distribution points we have, the faster the vaccine can be distributed,” he said. “Let’s increase the number of those sites and get them onboarded quickly so that … the only delay is that we don’t have the vaccine from the manufacturer.”

Several questions linger, including whether businesses can require employees to be vaccinated, and whether and how to track whether employees and/or customers have been vaccinated.

Saunders said polling indicates that nearly 70 percent of Utahns are open to receiving a vaccination. There is no appetite for mandating it for the entire population, but the health department wants to ensure that good information is available so that people can make informed decisions.

The department does not expect a 100 percent vaccination level, “but we’re hoping for enough to be willing to be vaccinated to change the course of this situation that we’re in,” he said.

Another sticky question is how to decide who is an “essential worker.” Lakin said some are obvious, including healthcare workers and staff at long-term care facilities.

“As we move further, how we define what essential workers are, it really depends on who you ask,” he said. Everyone believes they are essential workers, he said.

The health department will follow a risk-level model, under which workers unable to work at home and face a high level of virus exposure would be a higher priority for vaccination than people who can work remotely and therefore have a low exposure risk.

It’s all part of the balancing act that health officials, the business community and society at large must employ to advance to a post-COVID time, they said.

“We’ve been successful so far on many fronts,” Saunders said, “and also we’ve been very successful at keeping business open and trying to promote commerce and people getting out and exchanging money for goods and services, and all of those are part of the balance.”