Illinois will officially be back to full capacity at all events starting on Friday, but local residents are being encouraged to still use caution when it comes to COVID-19.
Melissa Rome, the Emergency Planning and Response Coordinator for the Vermilion County Health Department, says that 70 percent of the county is still not vaccinated and should continue to practice distancing measures. She also says that those with preexisting health conditions (more than half of all county residents) are also at risk.
“If you are immunocompromised and you’ve been vaccinated, you still need to take precautions, just because you never know,” she explains. “Nothing is 100 percent effective.”
Saturday will mark the final day that the Illinois National Guard will be assisting the department with vaccine clinics. The Guard has been very helpful in vaccinating thousands of people in the county over the past three months, but some of the recent clinics have seen only a handful of people attend. Rome blames much of the low vaccination rate on misinformation that is prevalent in the county.
“In this day and age we deal with a lot of conspiracy theories, and many of those conspiracy theories can cause a lot of people harm, and cause people to not get the help that they need,” she says.
As for the future, Rome says the health department will likely be done with the Pfizer vaccine after this week, although several of the private providers in town are still carrying it. A couple of Moderna clinics have already been scheduled for the coming weeks, and she expects the company to gain approval for teenagers to take its vaccine later this month.
Looking ahead, Rome says booster vaccines could be on the horizon for the virus’s variants, although nothing is certain at this time.
