Community News C
OLMSTED COUNTY COVID-19 UPDATE T he global pandemic continues to have enormous effects on everyone – including businesses,
The Rochester business community quickly responded, allowing us to fill the vaccination clinics quickly and efficiently. To date, 1,143 business forms were submitted from roughly 200 business sectors identifying thousands of staff who were interested in receiving a COVID-19 vaccine. Since late December 2020, we’ve provided nearly 20,000 vaccines to our critical workforce, their families and others wanting the added protection of a vaccine. We feel confident that our essential service workers and businesses have been contacted and offered the opportunity to be vaccinated and recently opened up our vaccination clinics to anyone over the age of 16, and now working closely with our schools to get our youth vaccinated. Vaccine supplies are becoming more consistent and over 9,500 vaccines are administered (on average) each week to Olmsted County residents through our medical providers, pharmacies, and public health. Our vaccination numbers and rates are enviable, yet there are still thousands who can still benefit from receiving one of the safe and effective vaccines to help protect against the COVID-19 disease. If you haven’t been vaccinated, please consider it and help all of us get back to doing the things we know and love and become a community of immunity.
education, healthcare and government services. To date, 12,879 people have tested positive for the disease and 97 people have lost their lives in Olmsted County. While these numbers are large, they would have been far greater if we didn’t have the established and strong partnerships with our healthcare systems, schools and businesses. These partnerships were a key factor in managing and controlling the COVID-19 disease and vaccine distribution in our communities. COVID-19 vaccines began slowly rolling out in late December 2020. Many challenges had to be overcome including limited vaccine allocation, multiple vaccines, storage concerns, eligibility, along with staffing and safety procedures at vaccination clinics. Demand exceeded the vaccine supply for the first several months. Olmsted County surpasses the state in all vaccine age categories, due in part to our health orientated community and the many partnerships in place, including the Rochester Chamber of Commerce. With their help, we called upon the business community to complete an on-line COVID-19 vaccination business planning form designed so Olmsted County Public Health could quickly reach out to businesses and get their employees signed up for a vaccination when vaccine was made available to the different business categories, as defined by the Governor.
Advantage Magazine | 17
May 2021
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