Flu Shot Clinic To Double As Disaster Drill

By John Voket

Up to 600 Newtown residents who may want to receive flu vaccines on Saturday, November 4, can also help Newtown and several other regional agencies, by serving as “victims,” in a mass inoculation and dispensing exercise. The clinic and drill will be held that morning from 9 am to noon at Newtown High School and is being coordinated by Newtown Health District Director Donna Culbert.

“This would be similar to a scenario if several hundred Newtown residents attending an event at, say, Madison Square Garden, were infected there and coming home before the contagion started taking effect,” she explained. “We would need to know how to get anyone who might be exposed to a single controlled location to dispense inoculations and quarantine those infected.”

While the inoculation portion of the drill will use current influenza inoculations, nobody will be delayed or required to take part in a simulated quarantine, she said. Newtown and Ridgefield will be doing the same drill at the same time, using emergency service, police, and regional health district teams on site at the respective drill locations, while keeping in constant contact via land lines, computers, and a battery-operated satellite phone system on loan to the Newtown Health District from the State Office of Emergency Preparedness and Homeland Security.

Personnel from Danbury, Brookfield, New Milford, and New Fairfield Health Districts will be in Newtown assisting in the drill. Newtown Visiting Nurse Association volunteers will provide administrative support, and Bethel VNA nurses will be handling the actual inoculations.

A command center will be staffed off site at the Sandy Hook Fire and Rescue Headquarters for the duration of the drill. Local fire companies, Newtown Volunteer Ambulance Corps, and Newtown Police will also commit personnel to the activity, Ms Culbert said.

“We will have physicians on hand as well,” she said. “Dr Robert Grossman and Health District Chairman Dr Thomas Draper have both agreed to attend,” she added. “We want to encourage as many people as possible to attend, because we’ll be equipped to provide up to 600 inoculations in three hours. We want to make it easy for anyone to come.”

Ms Culbert added that anyone interested in obtaining a flu vaccine can appear at any time during the drill.

“We don’t necessarily want 600 people lining up at nine in the morning. There will be plenty of vaccines, and we want to simulate as closely as possible the out-of-town infection scenario where we would be contacting potentially infected people one-by-one and asking them to come in as soon as possible,” she said.

The drill will be an excellent opportunity to test the town’s communication system and incident command structure, she explained. The procedures will closely follow protocols the local Health District would employ during a pandemic, avian flu, or smallpox contagion.

The drill will be followed by a postincident assessment.

“We’ll breakdown each aspect of the drill to see how we did, and how we could do better,” Ms Culbert said. “You almost hope something interesting happens so we can all learn something. You don’t learn as much when these drills all go smoothly.”

This will be the first time since the Newtown Health District expanded to include Roxbury and Bridgewater that an opportunity has come up to test the multijurisdictional and interdisciplinary relations among numerous health and emergency services.

“The addition of a concurrent and connected drill in Ridgefield will certainly create a first-of-its-kind exercise since I’ve been involved in this community,” Ms Culbert concluded. “But it’s definitely important for us to know that we can handle a situation like this if it ever occurs. Even though it’s a one-in-a-million chance, preparedness is important.”