Onondaga County plans to soon shift its COVID-19 vaccine efforts and resources to focus on specific communities. County Executive Ryan McMahon said today that close to 200,000 county residents have received at least the first dose of a vaccine, but around 75% of the population needs to be vaccinated in order to reach herd immunity.
For Onondaga County to get there, McMahon said they need to adjust.
“Once we get through 16 and 17 year olds, 18 year olds, the younger demographics that became eligible,” said McMahon. “Maybe in another week or so here. We’ll have to really start getting proactive, and it’s going to harder. We knew this would come and it’s a good problem to have. We got to get to that 70%, 75% threshold.”
This week, the county will have a pop up clinic at Freedom Commons, and they’ll hold their first clinic for high school students in Baldwinsville. The community pop-ups will be the new focus of the county as it tries to increase its vaccination rate.
“We’re going to start hitting up different zip codes that we haven’t been in yet that the numbers are lagging a little bit. Then we’ll probably utilize reverse 911 to say we’re going to be in your neighborhood. Please go to this link. Register. Call this number. We can pre-register you. But we probably will allow walk ups at this point as well,” said McMahon.
McMahon said they are still working on the best ways to redeploy their staff from the mass vaccination site at the OnCenter into the community clinics. The OnCenter will still hold clinics for second doses, and first doses depending on demand. More school and community pop-ups are expected in the near future.
