Vaccine clinics held at senior housing
National Guard helps Clark County take doses to where the people are.
The Ohio National Guard has teamed up with the Clark County Combined Health District and others to help administer COVID-19 vaccinations to residents in highrise senior housing units in the county.
Christina Conover, director of nursing for the CCCHD, said the joint project between the guard, the health district, the Area Agency on Aging, Springfield Metropolitan Housing Authority and the Ohio Department of Aging, hopes to vaccinate between 100 and 150 seniors at four different buildings between Thursday and this afternoon.
The pop-up clinics were set up to target seniors who may be unable to get to the county’s regular vaccination clinic at the Upper Valley Mall, Conover said.
“It’s really an opportunity to break down all kinds of barriers, whether that be with options for transportation or just not knowing how to schedule an appointment,” Conover said.
Ohio Air National Guard Maj. Holly Hogsett said clinics hope to reach “as many arms as we can.”
She said the clinics are being held at “lower economic status senior housing developments where they have residents that live there but it’s not considered a medical facility.”
“So it’s not a medical facility, it’s not an assisted living facility, but they may have residents that are hard to get out or hard to transport. So we are bringing the clinics to them, so that we can make sure that this population, who is among the most valuable, gets inoculated,” Hogsett said. “Some of the residents within here have family members who have been able to help them get vaccinations, where some of them don’t have that capability.”
National Guard members assisting with vaccinations are all “medically trained and certified,” Hogsett said.
“They are nurses, physicians and medics. So everybody here that is giving the shots is medically trained and certified,” Hogsett said.
Thursday was the first day Ohioans 60 and older, law enforcement officers, childcare workers, funeral workers, pregnant people, bone marrow transplant recipients and people with ALS or type 1 diabetes became eligible to be vaccinated.
Conover said some of those vaccinated fell into one of those categories.
“We welcome anyone who qualifies,” Conover said.
Clark County had 12,318 cases of the coronavirus as of Thursday, according to the Ohio Department of Health. The system that updates each of Ohio’s county deaths was down on Thursday afternoon.
As of Thursday, Clark
County had given 23,703 total vaccination shots, according to data from ODH. That means about 17.68% of the county’s population has received at least one shot.
Contact this reporter at 937-610-7447 or email Riley.Newton@coxinc.com.