In rural Oklahoma, suspicions run high while vaccination rates stay low

Nurse practitioner Janey Hammons’ office on Main Street in the town of Seiling is one of the few places where residents can get the COVID-19 vaccine in Dewey County. The farming community of about 800 people hugs U.S. Route 270 between Watonga and Woodward in western Oklahoma.

Hammons’ practice has been able to vaccinate between 60 and 70 people in the community, but worries about what Dewey County’s low rates of vaccine uptake will mean for new cases of COVID-19 this winter as the delta variant of the virus spreads across the state.

Dewey County has the lowest COVID-19 vaccination rate among Oklahoma’s 77 counties. Just 29.3 percent of the population over age 12 had at least one dose of vaccine as of Aug. 28, according to data from the Oklahoma State Department of Health.

Hammons has sometimes worked shifts at Seiling’s 18-bed hospital — which has the county’s only emergency room. Since the beginning of the pandemic, it has gotten harder to find open beds at larger hospitals to transfer patients from Seiling and other rural hospitals, she said. Four of the state’s largest medical systems announced they had no free ICU beds on Friday as COVID cases continue to rise.

Read more: https://www.readfrontier.org/stories/in-rural-oklahoma-suspicions-run-high-while-vaccination-rates-stay-low/