Though you have to wait until next year to buy cheap home goods and sundries at Target, you will be able to get a COVID-19 vaccine there soon.Â
With little fanfare, the Teton County Board of County Commissioners approved a contract to use the old Kmart/future Target building as a mass vaccination clinic. Vaccine supply has finally increased to the point that the Teton County Health Department has been on the hunt for a larger-capacity site.
Mass vaccination clinics have been taking place at the Presbyterian Church of Jackson Hole, but the capacity is limited to 400 to 500 shots a day. The choke point is the waiting area, because people have to stay for 15 minutes after the inoculation so health care workers can monitor them for adverse reactions.
But manager Jim Morrison canât say why, exactly.
âOf course our business is down,â he told the News&Guide. âItâs just too difficult to say how much is purely affidavit driven, COVID driven, or snow driven. Itâs pretty evident that people are willing to risk traveling in COVID environments, even at a high risk level.â
Why hotels in the Roaring Fork Valley are seeing so much less traffic than those in resort towns like Jackson Hole is a central question in an ongoing debate in Pitkin County. Health officials there have reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic in two ways that health officials in Teton County have not: by requiring visitors to fill out a form confirming theyâve tested negative before arriving in Aspen and shutting down indoor dining when cases peaked in early January.
Teton County has a new problem with vaccines, albeit a much more desirable one.
After finding out at the end of February that it would receive about 5,600 doses of vaccines in March, the Teton County Health Department learned it would actually get more than 7,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine this month, along with 300 doses of the newly approved Johnson & Johnson shot.
The surplus doses are coming in an extra box of Pfizer vaccines this week. For a county that as of Monday had administered 7,630 doses total (first and second) in the first two and half months of vaccine distribution, giving out more than 7,000 first doses this month will be a huge undertaking.
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