Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Tri-County health officials on Thursday reported no new fatalities linked to COVID-19, along with 89 new infections in the area, while the area’s fully vaccinated population approached 15%.
Updated vaccine administration tracking figures from the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) show an increase of 2,963 doses in Peoria, Tazewell and Woodford counties since Wednesday, bringing the region’s total vaccinations to 138,634. The three counties averaged 2,428 shots per day over the past week.
The Tri-County’s number of fully vaccinated adults grew to 52,513, or 14.94% of residents. That includes 1,383 individuals completing their vaccinations in the past day. Illinois added 112,776 shots delivered since Wednesday, for a total of nearly 3.7 million injections with 10.25% of residents fully vaccinated.
Tim Shelley / Peoria Public Radio
Peoria County is currently administering around 8,000 COVID-19 vaccine doses a month. But all the pieces are in place to drastically upscale that operation if only more supply was available. If we got anywhere between 10 to 15,000 doses a week, between our health department, the two hospital systems, and our federally-qualified health center, we would be able to support that, said Peoria City/County Health Department Administrator Monica Hendrickson. That just shows you that we re prepared and have logisitics in place to do a large-scale operation.
The problem remains vaccine supply.
Currently, the county is administering around 2,000 doses a week. As of Wednesday, just more than 3% of Peoria County s population was fully immunized against the coronavirus.
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Tim Shelley / Peoria Public Radio
By the end of this week, the first few thousand residents of Peoria, Tazewell, and Woodford Counties in the 1B group will have received their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Local health departments are allocating their vaccine shipments to OSF HealthCare, UnityPoint Health, and Heartland Health Services for wider distribution to the 1B population.
That population is a large group, and the process will take quite a while, said Peoria City/County Health Department Administrator Monica Hendrickson. With the amount of allocation that we re getting, which is limited, if we as a Tri-County see anywhere between three and four thousand vaccines coming into our counties each week, it will take us over eight weeks to vaccinate that population, she said. So the short answer is, we need patience during this time.