AP
The Oakley-Lindsay Center in Quincy a five-hour drive from Chicago became an unlikely go-to spot during the pandemic. The regional convention center along the Mississippi River has distributed 25,000 vaccine doses per month, including thousands to Chicagoans who had trouble booking shots here.
But the costs to run the mass vaccine site, even with new, reduced hours and lower demand lately, still run into the thousands each day, said Jerrod Welch, the public health administrator of the Adams County Health Department.
It’s $50,000 a month to lease the convention center. Staff are paid $20 per hour. At its peak, the total operating cost to run the mass vaccine site every month is $175,000.
Provided
When the coronavirus first hit Chicago and Cook County last spring, Black residents bore the brunt of the surging death toll.
But over the past year, as Cook County deaths have climbed toward 10,000, the virus has wreaked havoc in nearly every corner of the region. Low-income communities of all ethnicities have been hit especially hard, from the heavily Hispanic neighborhoods around Cicero to majority-white areas like Niles and Oak Lawn.
Early pandemic hot spots like South Shore have been surpassed by communities like Cicero, where two low-rated nursing homes and a profusion of multifamily apartment buildings have led to consistently high death rates, according to interviews with public health experts and government officials and an analysis of Cook County death data and medical records
Doctors in Chicago's largest hospitals are pushing to make sure the city's smaller hospitals have the resources they need to adequately care for COVID-19 patients.