ROUTT COUNTY, Colo. — Vaccine eligibility will expand Friday, making Coloradans 50 and older, people with one high-risk health condition and many essential workers eligible to get their shot.
Across Colorado the 1B.4 vaccination group represents about 2.5 million people, and in Routt County, Brooke Maxwell, county public health nurse, estimates this group will include more than 5,000 residents.
With more people becoming eligible for the vaccine, the county has decided to close the vaccine interest form they had used to collect names and contact information about people looking to get the vaccine. Essentially, the list of over 7,000 people became far too cumbersome for Maxwell to manage.
With so many different providers offering the vaccine now, many people on the county’s list have already received the vaccine elsewhere.
“The lists have become so inflated that we legitimately have to call 70 people to find 10 that haven’t had a shot yet,” said Matt Johnson, owner and pharmacist at Lyon’s Corner Drug and Soda Fountain.
For a clinic last weekend, Johnson said he had people calling him Saturday to cancel Sunday vaccine appointments that had just been made Thursday, because they were able to get the vaccine elsewhere.
“That is the problem; the lists just don’t hold up to scrutiny,” Johnson said, adding that even if everyone were to call to remove their names from a list when they got the vaccine, that, too, would take quite a bit of time to manage.
The county is still using the list; they are just not adding to it. Maxwell reached out to people who had signed up on the list to see if they had already gotten the vaccine Tuesday in the hopes the county could further parse down the list and make it more useful.
> Watch video above: Colorado expanding COVID vaccine eligibility this week
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