No, Arizona isn’t on pace to run out of COVID-19 vaccines before weekend

PHOENIX – According to the Arizona Department of Health Services COVID-19 dashboard, vaccine administration is on pace to fully consume the state’s available supply as soon as Friday.

But that doesn’t mean the state will run out of vaccines before the weekend, because the dashboard numbers don’t tell the whole story.

Every morning, the dashboard’s vaccine section is updated with a variety of data, including doses ordered — which is the state’s total allocation from the federal supply — and doses administered. The information can be filtered by county.

The doses ordered generally increases on Mondays, when the expected weekly shipments are added to the total.

Thursday morning, the dashboard showed statewide totals of 1,395,300 doses ordered and 1,339,829 administered. That appears to indicate the state’s supply was down to 55,471 doses until next week’s shipments.

The reported number of doses administered has increased by about 110,000 over the past two days. At that pace, the remaining supply would be gone by Friday morning.

But that’s not going to happen, even with this week’s deliveries delayed because of winter storms across the nation. Why? The doses ordered numbers on the dashboard do not accurately represent the state’s actual supply, the health department said.

“The statewide ‘ordered’ total includes doses allocated to four tribal partners and the CDC Pharmacy Partnership programs in addition to doses ordered by all counties and State PODs [points of dispensing],” Holly Poynter, ADHS public information officer, told KTAR News 92.3 FM in an email Thursday.

“However, there are sites that receive direct federal allocation that are not included in this number but still report administered vaccines to the state.”

In addition, Poynter said that orders of the Pfizer vaccine are counted as five doses per vial, but some vials have enough vaccine for six shots.

Those discrepancies can lead to situations where the vaccine dashboard, which indicates in a footnote that the data is provisional and subject to change, shows more shots administered than available.

While that hasn’t yet happened with the statewide numbers, it has in three counties.

Maricopa County’s numbers showed about 10,000 more doses administered than ordered for the Phoenix area as of Thursday morning. The apparent discrepancy was about 6,000 for Coconino County and 2,000 for Navajo County.

While the vaccine well isn’t about the run dry, shortages are a real thing, and the weather delay is making things worse.

Some rural sites that use the Moderna vaccine have had to cancel appointments this week, authorities said.

For information about statewide vaccine availability, the ADHS website has a vaccine-finder page with a map of locations and information about registration.

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