Friday Multi-County Vaccination Clinic will Use Hotline, Not Online Registry
Trending
MOUNDSVILLE — The second and final vaccination clinic for Ohio, Marshall, Wetzel and Tyler counties will occur Friday, and applicants will need to pick up the phone to schedule an appointment, rather than going through the state's newly minted online registry.
The clinic will take place from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Friday at the Chevron Building at the Marshall County Fairgrounds. Appointments will be made by calling 304-221-9910 for Marshall County residents, and 304-234-3798 for Ohio County residents, both beginning at 8:30 a.m. Wetzel-Tyler County appointments are being filled by a previously established waitlist. This means the names will not be pulled from the state registry at vaccinate.wv.gov, which was launched Monday.
Ohio County Health Department Administrator Howard Gamble said the clinic will be taking appointments by phone because the counties had submitted the clinic last week, before the registry was available. Other counties in the state had already established waiting lists, and will pull from those to populate the clinic.
"When the online registry was announced, our clinics, we already submitted that information to the state," Gamble said Monday. "We thought the registry would push the names to our system, but we were being told that was not the case."
Gamble said the county was still hammering out details, as he did not want people to have to find their way through two systems or miss out because they went through one system but not the other.
"We're still trying to work through it, because the last thing I want is residents having to call two numbers," he said. "It appears that we'll have to have a call-in for the clinic.
"Working with Marshall and Wetzel-Tyler has been wonderful, they've been great partners," he added. "We had planned to do this, and we had planned to do it again, but we thought the registry system would take the place of my call center. We need to get more information about it, but until then, the individuals that continue to call into the registry system, and if our clinic is based upon a call-in, individuals can still get an appointment that way."
Following Friday's clinic, Gamble said vaccine distribution will return to a county-level system, working with local partners to distribute the vaccine, to reduce travel times for residents. Gamble said appointments going forward may be pulled from the state registry starting next week.
"I think a lot of people wanted (local clinics) so we didn't have to have people travel," he said. "The one in Marshall had some people traveling an hour and a half to get there, and that's small compared to Randolph-Pocahontas, where you had people traveling three hours."