The pace of the COVID-19 vaccine campaign is improving across the Chattanooga region. Supplies are steadily increasing, lines are moving faster and more doses are going into arms. Yet confusion and demand that far exceeds supply haven’t waned.
Although each state has a vaccination plan, that information changes regularly. Communication is inconsistent, and the process of receiving doses varies widely between individual counties and providers.
“I’ll have a couple people every day who drive up and say, ‘How do I get an appointment?’ And I don’t know how we’re missing getting the information out to those people,” said Steve Lamb, Marion County’s emergency management agency director, whose agency teamed up with the sheriff’s office to direct traffic and provide other logistical support at the county’s vaccination site.
And because data on where vaccines are going and who’s receiving them is scarce, it’s hard to tell how well states are reaching people who live in more rural areas, said Keith Mueller, health policy professor at the University of Iowa and director of the Rural Policy Research Institute’s Center for Rural Health Policy Analysis.