Fauquier Hospital, Fauquier County, the Town of Warrenton and the Rappahannock Rapidan Health District (RRHD) are establishing a storefront vaccination clinic in the Warrenton Safeway shopping center. Lease details are currently being discussed for the empty store.
The plan for the Safeway shopping center clinic is to administer state provided COVID-19 vaccines, once they arrive. County Administrator Paul McCulla said, in an email to the Falconer, “At the current vaccine dose levels we expect only to receive somewhere between 100 and 400 doses a week” due to a federal level vaccine shortage. Vaccinations will be scheduled, no walk in appointments are allowed.
Vaccine administration will be focused on persons over the age of 75 as well as public and private school staff, preschool personnel and daycare workers. Once vaccinations are complete for those groups, they will move onto the State’s 1B category, persons over the age of 65 with pre-existing conditions. “Due to the limited number of doses we are receiving it may take months to get through the 1B category,” said McCulla.
COVID-19 vaccines are federally distributed to the states, and each state decides how many vaccines to give to each county. Virginia currently receives 105,000 doses a week for 8.5 million people in the 1B category. With this rate, McCulla said, “it will take approximately 21 months to administer the COVID-19 vaccine to the whole 1B population.” However, in just Fauquier’s health district it will take around 6.5 months, according to McCulla.
Fauquier Hospital estimates they have vaccinated approximately 2,300 citizens of Fauquier and Rappahannock counties. The federal government stated that available vaccine doses should increase in late March or early April, but it is still unclear as to how this will happen.