The state will debut a website and phone number Monday morning for Vermonters age 75 and older to register for Covid-19 vaccine appointments starting Wednesday.

There will be guaranteed available slots for every eligible Vermonter to get an appointment in the next five weeks, Mike Smith, head of the Agency of Human Services, said Friday at a press conference.

“We expect some bottlenecks in the first few days of registration, but you’’ll be able to get an appointment during the weeks we are scheduled,” he said.

The slots are based on the best projections of the state’s ability to administer the vaccine, but Gov. Phil Scott said Vermont is still dependent on the federal government to distribute enough doses to make it work. New York was recently forced to cancel some clinics because of federal government supply issues.

Every day, patients at Evergreen Family Clinic in Williston pepper Dr. Paul Reiss with questions about when they’ll be able to get the Covid-19 vaccine.

When and where will they get it? Can they get it at Evergreen?

Reiss’s answers, he admitted sheepishly, feel woefully inadequate. He wants to offer the vaccine to his 10,000 patients, but couldn’t say whether that will happen, or when he will find out.

“We really don’t know much of anything,” Reiss said. “It’s hard to be optimistic or even critical, because we don’t seem to be in the loop. It’s really just a waiting game.”

Doctors and hospital officials say they’re ready and willing to offer vaccines to their patients as the state prepares to roll out the next phase of vaccinations to Vermonters age 75 and over, starting this week.

But they say they remain in the dark about even the most basic components of that process — who’s eligible to administer the vaccine, for instance, and how the state decides. And, for those who will help vaccinate people, how much vaccine they’ll receive and how they should prepare.

Medical staff at Rutland Regional Medical Center are developing a plan that would allow patients with COVID-19, if they are willing and if they have someone who can help support their care, to recover at their homes rather than in the hospital.

Kathleen Boyd, a registered nurse and senior director for care management and population health at Rutland Regional, said she and other health care provider like VNA & Hospice of the Southwest Region and Bayada Home Health Care, developed the discharge option for a select group of patients.

Boyd added that those patients will have access to “significant wraparound services” such as home care, skilled nursing and telehealth visits with a medical provider.

“It was designed to allow patients to have the option to recover safely and comfortably at home without the fear that they’re not going to have the care or the support needed if questions or concerns arise,” she said.

At the end of November, Dr. Dean French started as the new CEO of Northwestern Medical Center.

French is many things — a board-certified physician, an army veteran, an avid outdoorsman and a motorcycle repairman — but above all, he’s an experienced hospital administrator with a passion for supporting community-based, not-for-profit healthcare.

“NMC has the potential to be the highest quality, safest facility in the state of Vermont,” he said. “Becoming that is where our focus is as an organization right now.”

According to NMC, French was selected from a pool of 75 applicants. He comes to NMC after spending five years as the CEO of Community Medical Center in Missoula, Montana.

Prior to becoming a physician, French served in the U.S. Army Special Forces.

“I was an underperformer in high school, and I had lots of interests and dreams and goals, but none of them were very focused, so joining the military was a very smart decision,” he said.

It was while serving overseas, after a co-worker fell acutely ill and didn’t receive medical attention in time, that French realized he wanted to become a doctor.

“I wanted to go to medical school, because I felt like I wasn’t able to exert the influence I wanted to at that moment,” he said. “I felt like I needed to go — that it was my calling. I told my unit commander that’s what I wanted to do, and he was a farsighted person who allowed me in my last seven months of my enlistment to go full time to college.”

As the United States struggles to control record-breaking increases in COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations, the roll-out of two approved vaccines offers tremendous hope for saving lives and curbing the pandemic. To achieve success, however, experts estimate that at least 70 to 90 percent of the population must be inoculated to achieve herd immunity, but how can we ensure folks will voluntarily receive a vaccine?

Both vaccines require two injections. Pfizer-BioNTech's second dose must be given 21 days after the first and Moderna's second dose must be administered 28 days after the first. While public health and infectious disease experts have discussed strategies to enhance adherence, including the potential use of financial incentives, an examination of the scientific evidence on incentivizing vaccine adherence has not been discussed.

A new Commentary in Preventive Medicine by a team led by Stephen Higgins, Ph.D., director of the Vermont Center on Behavior and Health (VCBH) and professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont's (UVM) Larner College of Medicine, addresses that gap.

As cases of COVID-19 continue to quickly rise across the country, and as state officials say Vermont is experiencing a post-holiday surge in the virus, hospital occupancy is becoming more of a concern.

To that end, The New York Times has created an interactive map showing how many intensive care unit (ICU) beds are occupied at hospitals across the country. The map uses a dataset released weekly by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and can be found here.

According to the map, Northwestern Medical Center in St. Albans, as of the most recent batch of data Monday, was housing one COVID-19 patient, and has nine ICU beds available. NMC’s ICU occupancy is 49%, far below both the national and state averages of 79% and 60%, respectively.

A little further south, University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington appears to be dealing with a slightly larger caseload. According to the data, the hospital is housing 13 COVID-19 patients, and has 12 ICU beds available. Its ICU occupancy is at 71%, according to the data.