In an open letter to Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee, the three-member Kitsap County Board of Commissioners on Friday voiced issues over the “apparent trade in direction and lack of verbal exchange and clarity” of the state’s plan to battle the coronavirus pandemic.
Commissioners Charlotte Garrido, Rob Gelder, and Ed Wolfe, the three board of commissioners, referenced a letter written by members of the Washington State Association of Counties to the newly elected state Secretary of Health Umair A. Shah and Inslee about Washington state’s Coronavirus pandemic response.
In that letter, officers wrote: “The recent development and rollout of ‘Healthy Washington Roadmap to Recover’ is illustrative of our frustration and disappointment involving the absence of a collaborative planning and decision-making process.”
The officers stated the layout hasn’t won statewide support considering that it hasn’t hooked up buy-in or have developed perfect metrics for the design barring “consultation or meaningful engagement” with local public fitness agencies, they wrote.
“Unfortunately, this plan has created confusion, divisiveness, and, in some instances, undermined our public health work.”
Meanwhile, Inslee introduced a considerable effort to pace up the vaccination process on Monday, consisting of revising the present-day phase to consist of humans sixty-five and older. Previous tips for section 1b implementation called for individuals 70 and older and those 50 and older to be vaccinated in multigenerational households. According to the governor, about 80 percent of the nation’s COVID-19 deaths are amongst those sixty-five and more aged.
The letter criticizes the lack of neighborhood input.
The public officers who signed the letter additionally referred to the recovery diagram used to nearby fitness jurisdictions in two or one-hour conferences that no longer show enhanced details.
In the commissioners’ letter to Inslee, Garrido, Gelder, and Wolfe criticized the decision made to specially use neighborhood health companies for the COVID-19 vaccine rollout without suited engagement with the neighborhood public health agencies’ input.
“We have recognized for months that a vaccine is in development and requires a graph for distribution,” the commissioners mentioned in the letter to the governor.
“… From our vantage point, if the vaccination graph was underneath development and required providers to opt-in, why didn’t the Department of Health proactively recruit companies mid final year? It seems the recruitment did now not commence until the vaccines had been on the way to our state. And then, the responsibility fell to local public health.”
The commissioners noted that the tiered vaccination design is perplexing residents who were deemed “essential” personnel throughout the pandemic however locate themselves on the listing to be vaccinated. They stated that after nearly eight months into a four-phased plan for reopening, the new “Roadmap to Recovery” merely has two phases.
“This new plan leaves the average citizen doubting there will ever be an end to the pandemic and a resumption of their lives in earnest,” their letter stated.
“It is challenging to expect people to proceed to be vigilant when they no longer think about the why, the good judgment or the consistency at the back of the choice-making,” the commissioners wrote.
Kitsap County is currently in Phase 1a of vaccination in which frontline employees in healthcare settings, first responders, and long-term-care facility team of workers and residents are first in line to be vaccinated.
The county’s Department of Health introduced Jan. 6 guidance for Phase 1b of vaccination, which it says could start at the end of this month.