Range Community Clinic traveled to parts of rural Eastern Washington to administer COVID-19 vaccinations, but demand for vaccinations is dwindling.
CORI KOGAN/WSU PHOTO
COVID-19
‘PERFECT STORM’
As vaccination rates lag in rural northeast Washington, health officials fear COVID ‘onslaught’ BY WILSON CRISCIONE
S
am Artzis is exhausted. As both an emergency room doctor and the public health officer in rural northeast Washington, he’s spent more than a year trying to convince people to take COVID-19 seriously. But now more than ever, he fears there’s a “perfect storm” brewing that will devastate his community. In the Northeast Tri County Health District — where Artzis is health officer — just over one-third of people 16 and older have initiated vaccination. Yet the more contagious Delta variant has arrived as the dominant strain there, and people are attending large indoor gatherings more now that the state has lifted restrictions. It’s a recipe for “the next onslaught” of preventable disease, death and economic fallout, he says. “I’m past frustrated. I’m tired,” he says. “But what we
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need to do now is just focus on the next challenge and try to be as prepared as we can with the limited resources we have in the Tri County area.” In Washington as a whole, more than 70 percent of people 16 and older have initiated vaccination for COVID-19. But that number doesn’t reflect the wide disparity between urban and rural vaccination rates, and health officials like Artzis are warning that rural Eastern Washington remains vulnerable to deadly COVID-19 outbreaks and possibly more shutdowns. Efforts to vaccinate more people in rural areas, meanwhile, have stalled. The low vaccination rates in northeast Washington are no longer due to a lack of supplies or resources. It’s more often due to people’s politics and ideology — something that health officials say they have a
difficult time overcoming. “We believe we’ll continue to see cases long in excess of what heavily vaccinated communities will,” says Northeast Tri County Health District administrator Matt Schanz. “We’re going to be dealing with this much longer than others.”
ASK YOUR DOCTOR
While there’s a stark difference in vaccination rates between rural and urban areas in Washington, population density isn’t actually the best predictor of vaccination rates. A stronger correlation is with the presidential election: Counties with a higher share of votes for Donald Trump have had lower vaccination rates. ...continued on page 12
