State takes county’s vaccine
The phone call that came in on Thursday to Chickasaw Public Health and Homecare Services was a, in a word, stunner.
On the line was the Iowa Department of Public Health and the message was curt: You’re not getting any COVID-19 vaccines next week.
“It was just shocking,” Public Health Administrator Lisa Welter said, “and I’m not going to lie. We cried tears, both for the people of our county and for us. We haven’t seen our families — there are days we’re coming in at 7 a.m. and leaving at 7 or 8 at night — and we felt like we were doing a good job, that we were following the state’s guidelines.”
And Welter still believes it, and now, so too, does the state.
She told the Chickasaw County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday that she has received several calls from state officials, who have conceded that the state got its “numbers” wrong because of a software glitch.
At a meeting of the Chickasaw County Board of Supervisors Tuesday, Welter said the state had promised that the county would receive 200 additional vaccines this Friday.
— For more on this story, see the Feb. 16 Tribune or the Feb. 18 Reporter