Urgent Care Physicians, Nurses and Staff Need the COVID-19 Vaccine!
The very first case of COVID-19 in the United States was confirmed in a patient during a visit to an urgent care center on January 19, 2020. Since then, we have tested approximately 22 million patients across the country for COVID-19 every day, for 12 hours a day. While our physicians, nurses and other staff have experienced high COVID-19 infection rates and are at risk for becoming infected every day, most of our clinicians and staff have yet to receive the COVID-19 vaccine and there seems to be no plan in place to prioritize us. We need your help to learn how we can get our staff vaccinated. Please direct us to the appropriate contact person to ensure that we can receive the vaccine immediately. We want to go home safely to our families and continue to provide treatment to our patients.
On average urgent care centers are testing 70+ patients per clinic each day and this number is increasing each week. Urgent care data indicates that approximately 60% of urgent care patients tested for COVID-19 receive a positive diagnosis. This means that each day an urgent care physician and other staff are exposed to approximately 42 different patients with active COVID-19 infections. Even with this high exposure, we have not been among the first to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. As frontline providers, urgent care clinicians and staff must receive immediate access to the COVID-19 vaccine and we need your help now!
While hospitals and emergency rooms are visibly serving on the frontlines of the pandemic, urgent care centers are in the infantry, fighting in the trenches to diagnose patients, provide treatment and keep them out of hospital emergency rooms as ICUs around the country are reporting zero capacity to treat new patients. I urge you to help us continue to serve our patients and keep them out of emergency rooms by working to ensure that urgent care clinicians and staff have access to the COVID-19 vaccine immediately.
Thank you for your help!