Further reports are that this might produce a shortage of “second doses”.
I suspect that this will show up in the pit and people will vent, but here’s a topic for non-pitting discussion. Some thoughts:
“There was an alarm system, but it didn’t work.” So there was an alarm system, but it was never tested? I hope that every site around the nation has alarm systems for their storage freezers and will now test them.
I recall a similar incident from a “book of stupid”. It seems that one hospital in South Africa was losing patients - then found out that a cleaning person was unplugging their life support to plug in cleaning equipment. Lessons learned – lessons forgotten.
Aren’t there locking plugs? Or a cover that could be placed over the wall outlet and locked in place?
Somebody somebody’s Law: Never ascribe malice where stupidity will do.
Opposing argument: Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence , three times is enemy action.
(This the third time batches of the vaccine have been destroyed.)
Thank you for the fact-check. At least I wasn’t guilty of the all-to-common “I read it on the internet so it must be true.” Now it’s “I read it in a book, but a reputable internet site says that it is false.”
Yeah. I had to throw out a a lot of food and the freezer when i had a freezer fail (and i failed to notice it.) And i looked up freezer alarms, and it’s not a mature market full of appropriate options.
I expect this will happen from time to time. That’s why there was so much fretting about “the cold chain”.
A shortage of 1900 second does is likely. A drop in the bucket overall. I’m sure there will be more losses like this. Even if the alarm goes off, what if the freezer is broken? Do they have backup units for every freezer?
If this is indicative of the problems we’ll see from here on out then we are in very good shape. But I’m sure we will have, and probably already have bigger problems than that to deal with.
We have freezer alarms at work, and they are a disaster. I’m not in charge of them, so I don’t know details. They alarms have failed to alert when the freezers exceeded temperature. New alarms were purchased, installed, tested, and all that. The new alarms then failed to alert.
It’s my understanding that alarms triggered, they just failed to alert somebody to do something about it. Except during testing, then everybody who is supposed to gets a message.
Decent facilities will have dedicated and backed up opower supplies in hospitals - however there are loads of old facilities around and the circuits have been amended so many times and incorrect changes made to the legend in the boxes that it can be something of a lottery trying to work out which circuit goes where.
Hospital buildings are subject to constant alteration, changes to partitions and clinical managers will use up their budgets without keeping everyone else on board - especially the facilities management.
As for alarmed cool facilities, again departments will buy this stuff and never tell anyone else about it, estates maintenance will have to go around every few years just to audit everything, a really mind numbing job that is often neglected. You can’t just buy an alarmed freezer without working out how it will be monitored and what actions need to be taken by whom - clinical staff think magic happens when they make unauthorised changes.
Just put a high-decibel klaxon horn on the alarm, and people will notice.
Hey, I worked at a place with a huge tank of highly filtered saltwater, continually pumped from the ocean into a the tank, and an open drain at the bottom of the tank where the water continually ran out. And if those pumps ever stopped, the klaxons would wake the dead. We had a few people who lived at the lab, so there was 24/7 coverage. Those horns would wake you up for sure. How do I know? I was one of the people who lived there, rent-free, for about three years.
You seem to imply that maybe we don’t need to know if a freezer fails because there’s nothing we could do about it anyway? We still need to know about it so the spoiled doses can be known and discarded.
Once, working with some business-critical mini-computer systems, one site had a intermittent problem with a major system – it kept dropping offline every other evening, then coming back just fine about a half-hour later. Technicians checked it out extensively, and could find no hardware problems at all.
Eventually discovered that the system was plugged via an extension cord into a normal outlet, and that the janitor unplugged it so that he could plug in his cleaning machine. (There was a real shortage of outlets in the room.)
Well, the janitor was told not to unplug that any more. But the company management got some serious reprimands for these violations:
using an extension cord to power a business-critical system.
plugging it into a normal outlet (not conditioned power).
plugging it in at all rather than being direct-wired to a dedicated power circuit.
In the end, the janitor was just doing his job. But the computer department management clearly was NOT doing theirs properly.
So my question here is similar: who puts critical drugs, ones in short supply, that need controlled cold temperature, in a standard freezer that is plugged into an outlet? Seems like the hospital management should be facing some serious questions here!
Seriously overworked people in need of something to keep those drugs cold. I’m not sure what kind of freezer it was, but suspect they are in high demand. Get it, somehow find room for it, plug it in and look for the next one.
“When you’re ass deep in alligators, it’s hard to worry about draining the swamp”.
I’d expect many ordered (extra) freezers, and there just wasn’t time to do everything at it should be done? That someone decided the (relatively) few doses lost to spoilage because of this was worth it for having the facilities able to distribute.
