Vaccine Supply, Demand, and Our Efforts to Ramp Up

Please note this blog post was published on February 5, 2021. For the most up-to-date vaccination information, visit our vaccination page.

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services currently outlines groups of people as currently eligible for vaccine or groups that will be eligible for vaccine soon. About 40% of the people in Wisconsin fall into these two groups:
 

Supply vs. Demand

As of right now, Wisconsin receives about 70,000 first doses of vaccine each week. State officials continue to request more vaccine, but every other state is also trying to maximize the amount of vaccine they receive. There simply isn’t enough to go around immediately.

In Dane County, people who are currently eligible (e.g., people 65 years old and older) and soon to be eligible (e.g., teachers) make up at least 30% of the county, but we’re only receiving a fraction of those doses. This means everyone has to be patient as vaccinators—including Public Health Madison & Dane County—schedule people in the approved groups for vaccine.

Vaccination Among Dane County Residents

Everyone wants vaccination rollout to be going faster, but we are making great progress. In Dane County, we have more people vaccinated against COVID-19 than we’ve had people who have tested positive. It took us about a year for about 38,000 Dane County residents to test positive for COVID-19. In just over six weeks of having vaccine available, 56,798 Dane County residents have been immunized with at least one dose of vaccine. That is just over 10% of our population. Nearly 29% of Dane County residents 65 years old and older have at least one dose of the vaccine.

Ramping Up

Public Health Madison & Dane County is one of several dozen vaccinators in Dane County. We are currently receiving enough vaccine to administer an average of about 480 vaccines per day. We hope to be given our full request amount soon. In the meantime, we are ready to ramp up vaccination should we start receiving more doses. We are hiring more staff and freeing up resources to be able to operate more lanes of vaccination, more hours per day, and more days per week. Right now, our state is constrained by supply, not capacity.

Federal officials have indicated that there might be an increase in vaccine supply soon. This will allow all vaccinators in Dane County to increase operations and more quickly get people vaccinated.

To learn more about the state vaccination effort, subscribe to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services’ weekly newsletter. Check out our dashboard to monitor Dane County’s weekly vaccination progress.