Last Nevada county to report COVID-19 case still awaiting vaccine

Almost three months after Nevada administered its first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine in Clark County, rural Esmeralda County has yet to receive any of the potentially life-saving serum. And county officials say they don’t expect the situation to change anytime soon.

Sgt. Matthew Kirkland with the Esmeralda County Sheriff’s Office said Wednesday that residents have been able to get vaccinated in other counties but that the absence of any local vaccine clinics makes it difficult for authorities in the county, which is about 200 miles northwest of Las Vegas, to track how many residents have done so.

He said he would love to see local points of distribution, or PODs, but isn’t sure that is feasible in the county with fewer than 1,000 residents given current eligibility restrictions.

“I think the PODs are a great thing, and it’ll be a good thing once we get to that stage, but at this point in time with the low numbers we have, I don’t think it’d be good to risk wasting vaccines on people not showing up for one reason or another,” Kirkland said. “I truly believe they’ll be a good thing eventually, but at this point and time I think we’re doing the best we can.”

First COVID-19 case in November

The county was the last in Nevada to report a case of the disease caused by the new coronavirus on Nov. 13 — more than eight months after the first COVID-19 case in Nevada was confirmed and after the state already had recorded 86,835 cases.

Now it is one of only two counties in the state reporting no doses administered. The other is Storey County, but the Carson City Health and Human Services agency has held numerous vaccination clinics there.

County Commissioner Timothy Hipp said Esmeralda County, on the other hand, has been unable to establish a dialogue with the governor’s office on the COVID-19 vaccine. He said he reached out to express concern about the situation but has only the general phone number and hasn’t gotten any response.

“The governor is up there sending out these mandates, but there’s no way for us, the local governments, to communicate back to him and say, ‘Hey, can you clarify this? What about this?’ ” Hipp said. “There’s no communication back and forth there.”

One difficulty is tracking the percentage of the county’s population that has been vaccinated, Hipp said. According to Kirkland, officials estimate that roughly 12 percent to 15 percent of county residents have received vaccine in other counties and 75 percent to 80 percent have made appointments to get vaccinated.

He said the state has been running vaccination PODs to Tonopah weekly, and Esmeralda County is notified when its residents are vaccinated there. But the nearest permanent vaccine site is at a Raley’s pharmacy in Tonopah, about 30 minutes outside Goldfield, and Kirkland said the county receives no notifications when a resident gets vaccinated there. Military veterans also may be getting inoculated at Veterans Affairs clinics in Las Vegas or Reno, he said.

‘A very rough guess’

“If people go to Raley’s or the VA hospital or pharmacies in Vegas or Reno, I’m not getting that information, so our guess is a very rough guess,” Kirkland said. “So I know we’ve vaccinated about 12 percent to 15 percent of our residents, but it could be way higher than that.”

Kirkland said the sheriff’s office is encouraging residents to attend the Tonopah PODs to help alleviate strain on the Raley’s distribution center. But Nye County said in a release Wednesday that it needs more volunteers at clinics throughout the county, including those in Tonopah.

Hipp noted that the Nevada National Guard ran three testing sites in Esmeralda County in August, before the first of its 37 confirmed COVID-19 cases as of Friday. No deaths have been reported in the county.

He said it would be great if the National Guard could come administer vaccines within the county, but he wasn’t aware of any plans to do so.

The National Guard declined to comment, saying the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services would be responsible for arranging vaccine clinics in the county. The DHHS did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday.

Hipp said he is also frustrated with the distribution of last year’s CARES Act funding. According to a breakdown from the Nevada Health Response, Esmeralda County received $159,428 of the $148.56 million the state received last year to help counties with populations less than 500,000.

‘Struggling to survive’

“We’re struggling to survive here and we have no money for medical facilities, but we didn’t even get 1 percent. We got 0.1 percent of 1 percent of the money because it was distributed purely based on population numbers,” Hipp said.

He added that he hopes the money in the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package that President Joe Biden is expected to sign Friday will be doled out differently.

“What I would like to see is kind of a congressional split where that money would be split in half and half of it would be divided equally amongst the 16 counties, and then the other half can be distributed based on population numbers.”

Gov. Steve Sisolak’s office did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday about how the money would be divided among the state’s counties or Esmeralda County’s efforts to contact his office.

Contact Alexis Ford at aford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0335. Follow @alexisdford on Twitter.