BOISE, Idaho — St. Luke's Medical Center will be ready within days to begin administering a third shot of the COVID-19 vaccine to people who have conditions or medications that leave them with a limited immune response.
Those who should consider getting the "booster" shot - essentially an identical third dose of the messenger RNA vaccine - include those going through chemotherapy, people who had an organ transplant and those who are HIV-positive.
A doctor's note or prescription is not necessary to get the third dose, Dr. Laura McGeorge said, but St. Luke's is recommending that anyone who wants the booster talk with their primary care doctor about it.
"Studies have shown that some immunocompromised people do not have as robust immuno-response to the vaccines as people who have normal immune systems," McGeorge said, adding that a kidney or liver transplant recipient typically has about a 50% response rate to the original two-dose vaccine, compared to a 90% response rate in those who are not immunocompromised.
The third-shot rollout comes as COVID-19 infections soar and the number of available ICU beds shrink across the state, led largely by the delta variant, a more infectious strain that now makes up 80% to 90% of new infections nationwide. Nearly 100% of those who end up hospitalized with COVID-19 are unvaccinated.
McGeorge said St. Luke's is in the process of opening an additional intensive care space to help deal with the surge, which she said is as dire as the winter 2020 spike that came before vaccines were available to anyone.
"All of these COVID patients that are taking up these critical care beds, we need to be able to get those heart attack patients into those beds and those stroke patients in too," McGeorge said.
However, adding additional space means that bone-weary nurses, respiratory therapists, ICU doctors, and nurses will be stretched even thinner than they already are. St. Luke's has already announced a pause on elective surgeries to help with staffing levels, and hospital leaders have warned that hospitals could soon move to crisis standards of care if the onslaught of new cases continues.
"It's not just room and physical space, we now have to find extra intensive care doctors, extra respiratory therapists, and extra critical care nurses to fill a unit that we never even had before," she said.
McGeorge renewed the plea for more Idahoans to get vaccinated, both to save their own lives and to help preserve healthcare capacity for not only COVID-19 patients, but also those who have a heart attack, a stroke, or get in a serious car wreck. She expressed frustration with the disconnect between the increasingly urgent situation at St. Luke's and the indifference she sees outside its walls, where many are "going on as if there were no pandemic."
"Whether that's concerts, large gatherings, people not masking, those kinds of situations just make me..." she said, trailing off. "I am completely confident things are going to get worse before they get better."
At KTVB, we’re focusing our news coverage on the facts and not the fear around the virus. To see our full coverage, visit our coronavirus section, here: www.ktvb.com/coronavirus.
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