State gives new incentives to get COVID-19 vaccinations themountainmail.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from themountainmail.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Happy Haynes, the current Denver Parks and Recreation executive director, Denver Board of Education president and former City Council member, was among those getting a COVID-19 vaccination at Shorter AME Church in Denver, Sunday, Feb. 7, 2021.
Starting Thursday, all Coloradans who get vaccinated against COVID-19 at a state-operated vaccine site are eligible for a $100 Walmart gift card while supplies last.
“This will help people get protected first and foremost,” said Gov. Jared Polis, as he announced the new incentive. “That s why we re doing it, but we know it means a lot to a single mom with three kids, 12 to 17 to go and get vaccinated with the family and get $400 worth of Walmart gift certificates. That can make a big difference.”
Sixty-seven community college students will also win scholarships as part of the state s latest push to improve its vaccination rate.
Both programs are the second effort to provide cash benefits and scholarships to nudge the wait-and-see crowd, as Polis has described the dwindling share of the state who are neither opposed nor enthusiastic about vaccinations, toward inoculation.
Ten sites across Colorado will offer the gift cards to anyone who gets vaccinated there beginning Thursday, and the program will extend at least through Sunday. Polis said families can get cards for each member who gets inoculated. Polis specifically shouted out Mesa County and other Western Slope areas that have been hit especially hard by the now-dominant delta variant, as being sites for the giveaways.
During a July 21 press conference about Colorado s battle against COVID-19, Governor Jared Polis announced a new incentive for residents who were not convinced to get vaccinated against the disease in exchange for a chance to win $1 million in a recently concluded series of drawings: a $100 Walmart gift card for each eligible person of any age willing to get jabbed. I know it means a lot to a single mom with three kids twelve to seventeen to go get $400, Polis said.
This wasn t the only new giveaway intended to boost inoculations. The event the first COVID-focused Polis press conference in some time also featured the unveiling of Shot at a Scholarship, a program aimed at community college students in the state funded by a gift from Amazon cumulatively valued at $75,000 (an amount we d estimate as being equivalent to one micro-drop of fuel maybe for the rocket that blasted Amazon founder Jeff Bezos into the lower level of space yesterday).
Data from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment on Wednesday showed El Paso County is home to 258 confirmed cases of the extra transmissible, more dangerous B.1.617.2 variant, also known as the Delta variant. That’s four times as many cases of the new strain, identified in India in December, as were reported two weeks ago, when state data showed there were 63 cases of the variant strain locally.
El Paso County has the state’s second-largest concentration of the Delta variant, but Mesa County in western Colorado remains home to the largest concentration with 552 cases, more than twice the number reported two weeks ago, according to state data.