Lancaster County officials will hold a press conference today to provide information on the process of distributing COVID-19 vaccinations to county residents through mass vaccination sites.
The press conference will begin at 1 p.m. at the Lancaster County Public Safety Training Center in Manheim. LNP | LancasterOnline will livestream the conference, and the stream will be embedded in this post when it begins.
Lancaster County vaccinators have received roughly 30,000 doses, according to Pennsylvania Department of Health weekly vaccine provider data, but it is unclear exactly how many of those has been administered, as the state is currently only releasing data on who has been vaccinated by their county of residence, not by where the vaccination occurred.
As of Tuesday, 22,724 Lancaster County residents have had at least the first dose of a vaccine, which is 4.2% of the county’s population of 545,724.
In December, the county officials approved Lancaster’s McCaskey East High School and Quarryville’s Solanco Fairgrounds as vaccination sites when larger quantities of vaccines were made available.
The sites will only be utilized if health care facilities and pharmacies max out their capacity, officials said in December.
Appointments would go through an online sign-up process created by the state, and inoculations would be administered by health-care workers, they said.
However, the Acting Secretary of Health Alison Beam said Tuesday that the state will not be creating a centralized portal for vaccine appointments. Instead, Beam said the state’s plan relies on vaccine providers to create localized outreach and sign-up systems.
Philip Colvin, director of the Lancaster County Emergency Management Agency, said in December that the Pennsylvania Health Department will make the call as to whether the county should set up its mass distribution sites.
