Wisconsin Teachers To Receive Coronavirus Vaccine Starting Monday

WISCONSIN — Wisconsin will continue to ramp up its vaccination efforts in the coming weeks and months by allowing more groups to be vaccinated and opening four more community vaccine clinics, officials said on Tuesday.

In a news conference Tuesday, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers said in just over two months since the first doses of the vaccine arrived, the state has given out more than a million doses.

As it stands, over 45 percent of residents over the age of 65 in Wisconsin have received at least one dose of the vaccine, he said.

On Friday, Evers signed a bipartisan bill allowing pharmacy technicians and students to administer the vaccine. That, combined with Walgreens locations across the state receiving twice as many doses of the vaccine as in the week prior, will help increase the number of vaccinated residents.

DHS Deputy Secretary Julie Willems Van Dijk said on Tuesday that the number of doses delivered to the state by the federal government is also increasing. For the next two weeks, the state will receive 115,000 doses of the vaccine, up 64 percent from mid-January, she said.

Still, the demand for doses of the vaccine outpaces available doses.

"We had over 500 vaccine providers request 350,000 doses last week, so we will continue to advocate for more allotment from the federal government," Willems Van Dijk said.

To date, 1,208,152 doses of the coronavirus vaccine have been distributed across Wisconsin, Willems Van Dijk said. A total of 370,578 people have been given both doses of the vaccine, meaning they now have strong protections against the COVID-19 virus.

The governor said the state will open four additional community vaccination sites. More details are expected in the coming weeks.

The sites will be located in Lacrosse, Racine and Marathon counties, and a fourth will be split between Douglas and Barron Counties.

"As you know, earlier this month, our first community based site opened at Blackhawk Technical College [in Janesville]," Evers said. "We said then that our goal was to continue to expand the community sites as more vaccine became available and as we move further along in our vaccination program."

Starting on Monday, the state will add teachers and other child care workers to its list of residents qualifying to receive the coronavirus vaccine, the DHS deputy director said.

In Wisconsin, vaccination appointments open to the next consecutive priority group once 50 percent of the previous group has been vaccinated, meaning the state is on track to begin vaccinating educators and child care workers on March 1.

Willems Van Dijk said the state estimates people who work with kids make up about 225,000 people in Wisconsin.

"We know teachers work every day with a population that is not able to be vaccinated because of their age," she said. "We wanted to get our educators vaccinated as quickly as possible."

While teachers and child care workers will become eligible for vaccines on Monday, others in Phase 1B — including public-facing essential workers, agricultural workers and non-frontline health care workers — must continue to wait for more doses to become available.

"What it means for others is they will not be first in line," Willem Van Dijk said. "[Phase 1b] is a group of somewhere between 800,000 and 1 million people, and we don’t have enough vaccine for everybody to be in line the first week of March."

Vaccination sites will continue to vaccinate residents over the age of 65 who have not yet had an inoculation, officials said.

The state on Tuesday announced another 566 cases of the coronavirus had been reported, along with 33 more deaths caused by the virus.

All told, 560,564 cases of the virus have been identified in Wisconsin since the pandemic began, Willems Van Dijk said. The full COVID-19 death toll in the state stands at 6,317.

"Our thoughts continue to be with the families and friends who have lost loved ones to this virus," she said. "We must continue to do all we can to stop the spread."