At its current pace, King County wouldn’t meet vaccine goal until 2022
Feb 10, 2021, 12:45 PM | Updated: Oct 2, 2024, 8:45 pm
Healthcare workers distribute vaccines late into the night at a last-minute COVID-19 vaccine event in January. (Photo by David Ryder/Getty Images)
(Photo by David Ryder/Getty Images)
With vaccine shipments still scarce and infrequent, King County has struggled to get doses out quickly, falling well short of its target pace.
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In a presentation delivered to Seattle City Council’s Public Safety Committee on Tuesday, local leaders pointed out that supplies are still “not robust, steady, or predictable,” brought on by unexpected drops in doses that have made it “difficult to schedule and keep appointments.”
“Demand far exceeds supply,” the presentation outlined. “King County has received less than 30% of the doses needed to vaccinate the currently eligible population.”
The eventual goal is to have Seattle be the “first city in America to equitably vaccinate 70% of residents and workers,” and to have King County reach that same rate as well.
In order to reach that 70% benchmark combined between Seattle and the rest of the region, 1.25 million King County adults will need to get fully vaccinated. Given that both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two doses, that will see the county handing out 2.5 million total shots, 1 million of which will be distributed in Seattle. Those efforts will be spread across hospitals, pharmacies, mass high-volume sites, and mobile pop-up clinics.
If it continued at its current pace, King County estimates that wouldn’t reach its 2.5-million-dose goal until January 2022. The hope is that there will be an increase in vaccine shipments from the federal government sometime in the spring and summer, which would instead have the county meet its vaccination goal by September 2021. This could also be further sped along by a single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine (which isn’t yet available) — the county estimates that if approved by the FDA, it “could have 100 million doses distributed by June 2021.”
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In Seattle, the plan is to have enough infrastructure to hand out over 18,000 daily doses as high-volume distribution sites, and another 3,000 a day from “targeted mobile teams.” That will entail a multi-departmental effort that includes Public Health — Seattle & King County, the Seattle Fire Department, and the mayor’s office.
As of Tuesday, the latest data from the county indicates that the rate of those 16 and older who have received at least one dose ranges between 10% and 14% across the region. Seattle is further divided out into Central Seattle, North Seattle/Shoreline, and West Seattle, where the rates of those in that same category sit at 13.1%, 14.4%, and 13.6%, respectively.
You can see the full presentation delivered to Seattle City Council’s Public Safety Committee here.
