COVID-19 Vaccine Appointments Available For Lake County Seniors

WAUKEGAN, IL — Vaccine appointments are now available for all Lake County seniors registered through the county's online system, Lake County Health Department officials announced Wednesday.

Anyone aged 65 or older with a Lake County ZIP code is eligible to schedule a COVID-19 vaccination via the AllVax portal, according to the department.

"Our team is doing phone outreach to seniors who are registered but who have not scheduled, as we realize email can be a barrier and some people need the extra support over the phone," said Hannah Goering, communications manager for the health department.

"For AllVax appointments, we have been prioritizing our senior population as well as select groups of essential workers — preK-12, daycare, and first responders — and our plan has been to add additional groups of 1b essential workers once we reach 70% of seniors having had at least one dose."

More groups of Phase 1b essential workers will be made eligible to sign up through the online portal within the next week, she added.

Nearly 400,000 of Lake County's approximately 790,000 residents have already registered through the site.

It was not immediately clear how many from that list have already received doses, or how many registered residents over 65 have yet to book an appointment.

This week, the health department received the largest delivery of vaccine doses since they began arriving in the county in December, according to the county's website.

A record 24,410 doses were received for the week beginning Monday, nearly twice as many as the previous week and 2,000 more than the previous record set earlier this month.

According to Illinois Department of Public Health data, 66.7 percent of Lake County residents age 65 or older have received at least one dose of a vaccine. Of residents between age 16 and 64, 20 percent have been jabbed.

The vaccination rate for Lake County seniors is slightly higher than the average for the state, which stood at 64.7 percent. For 16- to 64-year-olds, it was slightly lower than the statewide average of 22.1 percent.

About 89,000 Lake County residents have been fully vaccinated, as of Wednesday, with 58 percent of them under the age of 65.

According to census estimates and the state public health department, 74.4 percent of fully vaccinated residents identified as non-Hispanic white, a group that makes up 60 percent of the county's population.

Those identified as Hispanic or Latino, who represented over 22 percent of the county's population, made up just 8.8 percent of those fully vaccinated.

People identified as Asian made up 6.8 percent of those fully dosed, compared to 8.4 percent of the county's population.

Black or African American residents make up about 7.5 percent of Lake County's population and 3.2 percent of those fully vaccinated.

According to age-adjusted coronavirus data from the Lake County health department, the prevalence rate for Latino residents was nearly four times as high as for white residents and more than two and a quarter times higher than that of Black residents, who have suffered the highest rate of deaths.