Officials in Gila County, Arizona, were concerned that there weren’t enough people signing up to get the COVID-19 vaccine — so they opened it up to everyone.
- Arizona approved the decision on Feb. 17, CNN reports.
What happened?
Officials in Gila County, Arizona, recently told CNN that people weren’t really signing up for the COVID-19 vaccine. So, rather than letting the vaccines go to waste, the officials opened up the eligibility to anyone over 18 to encourage more people to get vaccinated.
- “We were struggling to find folks within the 65 plus category to sign up for the vaccine,” Michael O’Driscoll, Gila’s director of health and emergency management, told CNN.
Officials said the new round of vaccinations has been successful because of proper messaging to the people.
- “What we did was we set up the pandemic exactly like what we would do during our fire season,” O’Driscoll said. “We set up our incident command very similar to that.”
Flashback
Back in January, I wrote about a rural county in Washington state that received praise because it didn’t waste a single dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Kittitas County in Washington state made headlines for not wasting a single dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
As I wrote about, the county has had to manage disasters in the past, especially wildfires, which made it easy to get the word out about the vaccine.
- “We’re a fairly rural county, and we get significant weather events, mostly wildfires,” said Rich Elliott, the deputy fire chief of Kittitas Valley Fire and Rescue, according to CNN. “Our county has a 25-year history of just sort of everybody — the hospital, the school districts, law enforcement, fire agencies, federal state partners — we just cooperate.”
Bigger picture
Per Bloomberg’s COVID-19 tracker, the U.S. has administered 82.6 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine. There have been 2.04 million doses given out per day over the last week.