Yellowstone County’s health officer says vaccine rollout is progressing in the state’s most populous region.
At a press conference Wednesday morning, Yellowstone County health officer John Felton said residents in Phase 1B who received their first vaccine doses at the centralized vaccination clinic in Billings starting mid-February are this week beginning to receive their second doses.
Felton says Yellowstone County also recently received about a thousand doses of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, which provides immunity in a single dose instead of two.
“We’re still working to get those out to those high-priority sites. I don’t believe at this point any of those vaccines have actually been administered, but we’re working to get those to high risk populations like seniors in senior living centers and shelters and places like that,” Felton said.
As of Mar. 8, Yellowstone residents eligible for the vaccine include people in a new category of Phase 1B+, which applies to people older than 60 years of age and people more than 16 years of age with additional medical conditions that create a higher risk of COVID-19 complications.
Felton says to date, roughly 19,400 county residents are fully immunized. That’s up from about 7,500 in mid-February.
Felton says the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths in the county in February are nearly ten times higher than last June. But he adds those numbers are a fraction of the peak in November.
“This is the lowest number we’ve seen in a long, long time,” Felton said.
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