MONROE — As the national death toll reached 300,000 and the surge of the coronavirus pandemic continues, local health care workers and nursing home residents are preparing to be in the first phase of the federal COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine arrived in Wisconsin Dec. 14 and is headed first to health care workers. It involves two injections, three weeks apart.

“We are excited to finally be at this stage with the vaccine,” Monroe Clinic spokesperson Rebecca Bordner said in a statement.

Because the vaccine supply is currently limited, she said, the hospital is following the priority vaccination plan set by public health and federal government experts.

Health care workers with the highest risk of exposure to the disease get first priority, with the intent to keep as many workers as possible healthy and available to care for patients. Nursing home residents are also included in the first phase of vaccine rollout, followed by essential workers, first responders and teachers, then those 65 and older or with pre-existing conditions.

Staff at Monroe Clinic underwent training “to allow them to administer the vaccine (and) allow us to move swiftly once the shipment arrives,” Border said. Plans are also forming for Monroe Clinic to work with community partners “to safely and effectively distribute the vaccine to additional priority groups and the general public” as it becomes available.

RoAnn Warden, director of Green County Public Health, reported that her department has applied to be a vaccine provider, however, “due to our staffing capacity” she’s unsure of the role public health nurses will have during the first phase of vaccine distribution. COVID-19 testing and contact tracing during the pandemic’s surge has strained the capacity of county health departments across the state in recent months.

Meanwhile, local nursing homes are awaiting the vaccine — and a timeline.

“We’re waiting,” said Tori Light, director of nursing at Wood’s Crossing at Wood’s Point, a skilled nursing facility in Brodhead. She said she and her staff have been relying mostly on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for information on the rollout.

“All we know so far is the end of December or the beginning of January,” Light said. “We really don’t know any more than the public knows. They talk a lot on the news media that nursing homes are first. That’s about all we know.”

At Lafayette Manor in Darlington, Interim Director Heather Spinhirne had about the same to say on Dec. 14: “We really don’t have any idea. We were told it would likely be between now and mid-January.”

In the meantime, staff and residents are undergoing twice-weekly COVID-19 diagnostic testing, alternating between the rapid (but less reliable) antigen test and the “gold standard” PCR lab test. Lafayette Manor has had staff test positive, but all are recovered, and so far no residents have tested positive, Spinhirne said.

The first step in the vaccination process is consent. The vaccine is optional and not mandatory for anyone.

“We will be looking for our residents, their families and our staff to determine who wants to get the vaccine,” Spinhirne said.

Walgreens and CVS pharmacies are contracted to distribute the vaccine to nursing homes as part of a partnership program with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Omnicare, a nursing home pharmacy network owned by CVS, is handling vaccinations at Lafayette Manor, Wood’s Crossing and other nursing homes.

At Monroe Health Services, Executive Director Jamie Duve said staff have been learning some details on vaccine distribution via webinars.

“What we’re hearing is that we’re hopefully going to have the vaccine by the 28th for our staff and our residents,” she said. She was also anticipating a toolkit that includes a vaccine information sheet and consent forms.

Among the residents, she said, there is broad support for getting vaccinated. Among staff, “there’s some reservation.”

Vaccines normally take years to develop, not months, making some nervous about the speed with which COVID-19 vaccines have moved from trials to emergency-use approval.

But Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, told the Associated Press that this speed “is a reflection of years of work that went before,” and faster vaccine development may become the norm thanks to new vaccine technology.

The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine “is a completely new type” of vaccine made from “bits of genetic material that ... instruct cells to produce fragments of the novel coronavirus’s spike protein,” according to Scientific American. Pfizer and BioNTech’s own analysis shows a 95% efficacy at preventing COVID-19, even among people with underlying health conditions.

The vaccine appears to be “very promising,” but “some important gaps in information remain,” such as whether it’s safe during pregnancy or for younger teenagers, the Scientific American report found.

Broad vaccination across a population is necessary for it to work. Additionally, the vaccines will be more effective at preventing death and illness in 2021 if they are introduced into a population where the coronavirus is not raging, the New York Times reported.

“Bluntly stated, we’ll get out of this pandemic faster if we give the vaccine less work to do,” one researcher told the Times.

The trajectory of the virus in Wisconsin appears to be slowing a bit, but it’s still very high or critically high across the vast majority of the state, meaning we won’t be seeing an end anytime soon to the need for health precautions like face coverings, physical distancing and avoiding gatherings outside the household.