JANESVILLE, Wis. – The recently formed Rock County Advisory Committee will ask the Rock County Board for $250,000 in funding during a regularly scheduled meeting Thursday night.
The committee, made up of 30 members including emergency managers, fire chiefs, healthcare partners and the county health department, would use the money to help further equip the county for widescale vaccination efforts.
“That money makes all the difference in the world,” said Kelsey Cordova of the Rock County Public Health Department. “All parts of the COVID-19 response and recovery are very human resource intensive. It takes people to do disease investigation and contact tracing. The more people you have, the faster and more effective you can be at that.”
Cordova said the money could go towards increasing staff, but also towards upkeep to local COVID-19 testing spots. Ultimately, she said the county is trying to put itself in a position to succeed when vaccinations become more widely available.
“Of course we would always like to see more vaccines going out in the community, but there are sort of distribution bottlenecks I suppose,” she said. “Each state only gets a certain allocation of vaccine, which means each jurisdiction within those states only gets a certain amount of vaccine.”
County Administrator Josh Smith said Rock County has given a first round of vaccines to nearly everyone in the “1A” vaccine category.
“We want to get it out as quickly as possible while thinking about equity, adhering to the guidelines that the federal government and the state government are putting together,” he said. “So it’s really as we have still a short supply of vaccines, it’s a good idea to engage in that planning for future rollout.”
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