© 2024 University of Missouri - KBIA
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Cooper County Has No Vaccines To Give Out; Hasn't Started Phase 1A

Cooper County won’t be starting the next tier of Phase 1B COVID-19 vaccinations Monday. The county is behind on Phase 1A and has yet to start on Tier 1 of Phase 1B. There are three tiers in that phase.

“What happens when the governor or the director of the Department of Health release information that services are available before those said services are actually out in all the communities, it sets people up for disappointment,” said Melanie Hutton, director of the Cooper County Health Department.

She said the county has been getting a lot of calls about who can get the vaccine and when. The Health Department is making a list of those who want the vaccine.

“One of the urgent issues with vaccine administration is especially with Pfizer is it cannot be carried over into the next day if you have a partially used vial,” Hutton said. “You want to have a list of people that you could call in quickly to say, ‘Hey, are you available today, we have a couple extra doses, you know, that we don’t want to waste.’ So that creation of that list is important to have.”

Even though Cooper County hasn’t been given the vaccine, it is working to secure doses to advance further in Phase 1A.

“We are working with a couple local hospitals to try to see if we can get enough vaccine from them to do our local health care providers that don’t have any vaccine yet,” Hutton said.

Those hospitals are Capital Region Medical Center and Boone Hospital Center.

“In small rural counties, when you don’t have a hospital, your emergency response people do far more health care and CPR than what might be in a larger community would because they’ve got more ready services available quickly. So it is different dynamics for rural versus city,” Hutton said.

The only hospital in Cooper County, Pinnacle Regional Hospital, closed in January 2020.

If Cooper County can get the vaccines from area hospitals, it can start vaccinating as early as this week.