State: Next priority group can receive COVID-19 vaccine next week; all adults before May 1
March 17, 2021
The next group eligible for a COVID-19 vaccine, which includes critical infrastructure workers, can begin receiving the vaccines Monday.
The group 1E includes fire service personnel who have not previously been vaccinated, as well as those who work in the following sectors: water and wastewater, energy, finance, food service, food and agriculture, legal, manufacturing, shelter and housing, transportation and logistics, information technology and communications.
Those in previous priority groups are still eligible for a vaccine.
There are an estimated 227,000 people in group 1E. Workers will not be required to show verification that they work in one of the critical industries.
“There is just lots of different ways employees would have to do that and that makes the process very cumbersome for both them and the vaccinators,” Secretary of Health Kim Malsam-Rysdon said.
“We’ve really been fortunate as we’ve worked through the priority groups and asked people to attest that they meet whatever the priority group is that we’re in (that) we’ve had a good showing with that, and people have been honest and truthful, and we’ll continue to use that approach.”
President Joe Biden has called on all adults to be eligible for vaccination by May 1. South Dakota will be opening up eligibility before that, Malsam-Rysdon said.
“We feel our state is ahead of this timeline and we will continue to move forward and are confident if the allocations hold up and increase as projected that we will be able to see all adults eligible for vaccination before May 1, so that’s pretty exciting,” she said.
The state allocation for this coming week is 21,000 doses, which includes more than 11,000 Pfizer vaccines, more than 8,000 Moderna doses and about 1,000 doses of Johnson & Johnson.
“Those are new doses that can start new people,” Malsam-Rysdon said. “In addition, we’ll get the second doses needed to get folks who were getting their first shot two or three weeks ago.”
That total does not include the doses going to pharmacies through a federal program. Those vaccines now are available at 65 locations statewide, including Hy-Vee, Lewis Drug, Walgreens and Walmart.
There have been two confirmed cases of the UK-based COVID-19 variant in Minnehaha County. While the symptoms are the same, the variants have been shown to make the virus more transmissible “and it’s also been identified to cause more severe infections, including hospitalizations and death,” state epidemiologist Dr. Josh Clayton said. “The same prevention measures we have been using over the past months are still effective.”
