WEST COAST CHUFFED AT TAKE-UP RATE
THEY’RE a proud bunch on Tasmania’s West Coast when it comes to the Covid-19 vaccination.
Residents, business owners and community leaders are confident the majority of the community is doing its bit to become inoculated.
The West Coast Council municipality is one of four Tasmanian local government areas (LGA) with no Covid-19 vaccination data available, but despite this the mood of the region appears very much in favour of getting the jab.
“They’re all going good, they’re all very old and vulnerable, but they know the good things are about,” 90year-old Bev Mee said when asked how she and the other members of
Queenstown Senior Citizens Club thought the Covid-19 vaccination rollout was coming along.
“We’re all doing what we’ve been told. I think our group realises that we’ve had these types of things when we were children and what saved us was the vaccinations — you know, tuberculosis, paralysis, all those sorts of things.
“We just go with the medical advice, but it’s the younger generations that think they know better than everyone else.”
Mrs Mee said club members all got vaccinated as soon as it was made available through their doctor.
Strahan cafe owner Rob Tassell took a little more convincing, but he too will be fully vaccinated in the days to come.
“You’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t,” he said.
For Mr Tassell, it was recently acquiring Molly’s Cafe at Strahan that prompted him to get the jab.
“[After] taking over the place, we thought ‘right, we‘re going to be here a lot more’ … so we booked in, got our jab, sat there and walked out,” he said. “I reckon there is pretty good [vaccination] rates.”
West Coast Mayor Shane Pitt agreed the community was pulling its weight in the vaccination stakes.
Last week a vaccine clinic at Rosebery ran out of doses and had to turn people away, but Mr Pitt said that just showed the community’s willingness to get vaccinated.
“People are keen to vaccinate for sure,” Mr Pitt said.
“Our population around here is fairly elderly.”
The self-described “full-time miner, part-time mayor” said his workplace and other mines in the area were incentivising the jab, which he believed also boosted the LGA’s rates.
“I don’t think there’s any barriers at all. Within the first month, I got a text from Ochre Health wanting to know if I’d get vaccinated, so they’ve been on the front foot too,” he said.
A spokesperson from the federal government’s Operation Covid Shield said LGA data was not released for some remote areas to protect people’s privacy, but all vaccinations uploaded into the Australian Immunisation Register formed overall national and state vaccination data.