Sometimes when life literally throws up a roadblock, you just have to improvise and hope for the best. Such was the case when a group of health workers with doses of the COVID-19 vaccine became trapped in a snowstorm on an Oregon highway. Don’t want to let those doses expire, they gave them to motorists trapped in the snow.
On Tuesday, Josephine County Public Health staff hosted a massive vaccination event at Illinois Valley High School in Cave Junction, Oregon. After a successful event, the team had six doses left to deliver to recipients in Grants Pass. Unfortunately, the team would not make it to Grants Pass because a snowstorm stranded them on Highway 199 near Hayes Hill.
To make matters worse, the vaccines would expire before they reached their destination.
But the workers had no intention of running proper vaccines, and with an ambulance on hand, they set up a makeshift roadside clinic. The JCPH staff walked from car to car, offering stranded drivers the chance to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Ultimately, the six doses were administered successfully, making the most of a bad situation. In fact, one of the recipients was someone who couldn’t get to high school in time for the original event.
I love this story. Being stranded in a blizzard is a terrible situation. There is nowhere to go and you have no idea when you will finally be on the road again. It’s even worse if you’re a health care professional trying to deliver a vaccine before it expires. But these people took immediate action to make sure that no dose was lost.
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To add icing on the cake to this feel-good story, health department director Mike Weber said the situation was one of the coolest surgeries he’s been a part of.