City hopes to distribute more than two-thousand COVID-19 vaccines a day by next week

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Coronavirus vaccinations for the City of Jacksonville launched yesterday, however the City is already planning on expanding vaccination sites. Chief Administrative Officer Brian Hughes told City Councilmembers Tuesday morning that they want to start giving more vaccines as fast as they can.

Hughes said that 1,063 vaccinations were administered Monday at the Prime Osborne Center. He wants to move that current number to two-thousand people a day within two weeks. The Mandarin Senior Center and the Lane Wiley Senior Center - current flu vaccination sites for the city - will be converted to COVID-19 vaccination sites in the next couple of days, according to Hughes.

“We believe those locations will yield at least five hundred apiece when we start up. So the two locations will add another one-thousand a day within, we think, a couple of days of ramp up,” Hughes said. “But our goal is to scale those up so they’re at least each one-thousand a day within probably two weeks after that, we intend to continue to expand locations around the city and continue to work with the state and federal partners to do that as quickly as we can.”

When it comes to the Regency testing site, Hughes believes that they are working to convert some of their facilities to become vaccine distribution sites, but that is up to the State Department of Emergency Management.

The end goal for the city is to give out ten thousand vaccines a day.

Councilmember Ron Salem noted that there are 125,000 residents in Jacksonville in the current eligible age group.

“So even at four or five thousand a day, it could be throughout January before we start dealing with other people,” Salem said.

A separate point raised by Councilmember Brenda Priestly-Jackson is that when people do go get their vaccine, a follow-up appointment for the second dose, which is critical for the vaccine to work, isn’t being made.

“They don’t have the capacity to sit there and reschedule it because that’s a separate system. But they are - my understanding was - they’re being told you should immediately leave and get a new appointment in this date range and not an absolutely no later,” Hughes replied. “They should go back into the system and and immediately try to schedule, not later than the date that’s on the card that they received when they left.”

The Florida Department of Health in Duval County have announced that new appointments for the COVID-19 vaccine will be added through the online system every Thursday at 5 p.m. The link for appointments will be on the alerts page on the department’s website here. Anyone with questions is asked to call 904-253-1140, but appointments will no longer be made over the phone.

Cox Media Group