(Radio Iowa) – Teams of Walgreens, C-V-S and Community Pharmacy employees began deploying Covid vaccinations Monday to the people who live and work in Iowa nursing homes, but it will be some time before the tens of thousands of shots are administered in all of Iowa’s long term care settings. Kelly Garcia is acting director of the Iowa Department of Public Health. She says federal officials are allowing the teams to give shots to people living in adjacent assisted living facilities as well. “This adjustment provides some significant flexibility for operations and for logistics, especially when you think about the way that facilities are structured,” she says. “They often have long term care facilities co-located in one property with an assisted living functon.”

While the State of Iowa is getting fewer doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines than originally expected this month, the effort to begin vaccinating residents of nursing homes is beginning this week as scheduled. A second dose will be required in late January. The federal government signed contracts with the three pharmacy companies to be responsible for the vaccinations at long term care facilities — so the doses are transported to each facility and the shots are given by pharmacy employees. Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds says deploying the vaccine is a monumental effort and there are bound to be bumps in the road.

“Just as we saw months ago when we launched large scale testing through Test Iowa, it takes time to ramp up and for things to run smoothly. We’ll likely experience the same as we begin broadening the scope of vaccinations across the state of Iowa as well,” Reynolds says. “I think we owe it to each other to assume good intent in these efforts and to give each other some grace while we navigate yet another new phase of our recovery.”

The state’s coronavirus tracking website Tuesday morning showed there were 114 Covid outbreaks in the state’s 423 nursing homes — and more than 45-hundred residents and staff have active infections. Thirty percent of the Iowans who’ve died of Covid this year were residents of a long term care facility.