Daily vaccination numbers for Boone County continue to show a steady decrease for the third consecutive week, according to data on the state vaccination dashboard.
“The issue Boone County is experiencing is actually happening with multiple counties,” Lisa Cox, communications director of the state’s Department of Health and Senior Services, said in an email. “We are still working with our software vendor to identify the root cause of the issue.”
Cox provided an example of what is happening in the software. At first, vaccination records of each person are entered into ShowMeVax, the secure data system onto which pharmacies and health care providers in the state upload immunization records. The initial records entered include full address information, including county.
Following this, if the same person receives another dose of any vaccine, like the second COVID-19 dose or even a flu shot, the address information does not include county.
“The missing ‘county’ field is overwriting the currently populated ‘county’ information, which results in our team unable to tell which county they belong to,” Cox explained. “The person is still in ShowMeVax and their COVID-19 vaccine information is being retained. It is their county information that is being erased, resulting in our map showing counties ‘losing’ vaccinations.”
Cox added that this software issue has been making it harder to track when the county is being overwritten.
“We are doing what we can to get this issue resolved as soon as possible,” she said.
Boone County’s hospital status turned yellow from green Monday for the first time since Sept. 22.
As of 6 p.m. Thursday, the status remained yellow, according to the Columbia/Boone County COVID-19 Information Hub. This means that hospitals are currently operating within standard capacity but are delaying non-emergency patient transfers. Earlier, they were accepting patient transfers from other hospitals and had licensed bed capacities.
All hospitals in Boone County provide a daily report of their status to the county Health Department. When two hospitals report their status to be yellow, or even one reports red, the overall status can turn to yellow. The status stays green if no more than one hospital reports is yellow.
There were 59 people hospitalized because of COVID-19, which is a slight increase from last week’s reported number of 51. Of those currently hospitalized, 13 were Boone County residents.
Last week, 17 Boone County residents were admitted to hospitals.
The hospitals also reported that 19 patients were receiving intensive care, and five needed ventilation support. Last week, these numbers were 11 and six.
The Health Department also reported four additional deaths due to COVID-19, which brought the total number of deaths to 166 in the county. Deaths reported in the last week include:
A person in the 65-69 age group, who died Sept. 28.
A person in the 50-54 age group, who died Oct. 4.
A person in the 60-64 age group, who died Oct. 2.
A person in the 80-plus age group, who died Oct. 2.
There were 353 active COVID-19 cases reported in the county on Thursday, compared to 362 last week. The total number of daily new cases reported for the past seven days numbered 252, which is a slight decrease from the 276 reported for the previous week.
