By Dave Dahl
SPRINGFIELD – News about sharing is part of Thursday’s state coronavirus briefing.
Counties with no hospital will donate their ration of vaccines, said Illinois Department of Public Health director Dr Ngozi Ezike.
“There were seven or eight counties that were initially slotted for that initial allocation that don’t have an actual hospital in their county,” Ezike said.” “We have reached out to every single one of those counties to work on the appropriate reallocation of that vaccine, whether it’s to the hospital that the residents of that county would seek their care at or the regional hub.”
Ezike also tried to assure Illinoisans the vaccine is free, and people’s privacy will be protected. That said, Ezike said the state must keep track of the distribution by region and by ethnic group.
Also, Gov. JB Pritzker corrected himself. After earlier in the week dismissing a reporter’s question about National Guardsmen and -women being deployed to the state veterans’ home at La Salle – where more than thirty residents have died of coronavirus – Pritzker confirmed that was the case. The governor apologized for dismissing the question as a “rumor.”
The state Thursday reported 11,001 new coronavirus cases and 196 more deaths.
Dave Dahl can be reached at [email protected].
