State Data Dashboard Tracks Vaccine Progress

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services launched a data tracker Tuesday to report the progress of the state’s efforts to immunize people against COVID-19 across the state.

The dashboard tracks how many vaccine doses have been allocated to Wisconsin by the federal government, how many have been shipped to the state by vaccine manufacturers and how many vaccines have been given.

The federal government has allocated 265,575 vaccines to Wisconsin and 156,875 vaccines have already been shipped. 47,157 vaccines have been administered, as of Dec. 29.

So far, most of the people who have received vaccines are healthcare workers. On Monday, the effort to immunize staff and residents living in nursing homes began, according to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Pharmacists from CVS and Walgreens were sent to nine nursing homes to begin delivering the recently approved Moderna vaccine.

The data dashboard shows that a large majority of the already administered vaccines have been the Pfizer vaccine, which was the first one approved in the United States but requires doses to be stored at extremely cold temperatures.

“We are committed to providing the public with timely COVID-19 vaccine information,” said DHS Secretary-designee Andrea Palm. “Even though we’re in the early stages of the Wisconsin COVID-19 Vaccine Program, it is important for Wisconsinites to know where we stand and highlight the unprecedented work being done by COVID-19 vaccinators across the state.”

The vaccine data is compiled from the Wisconsin Immunization Registry.

Even as vaccines become available to wider parts of the public, Wisconsinites will still need to follow other measures to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 — such as mask-wearing, social distancing and complying with efforts to test and contact trace infected people, noted DHS.

As part of that effort, DHS built a COVID-19 exposure notification system that allows people to opt-in to a program that uses the Bluetooth technology in cell phones to track close contacts with an infected person. That program was released Dec. 23 and by Dec. 29 nearly 1 million people have signed up.

After healthcare workers and nursing home residents are vaccinated, the state will begin working to immunize the elderly and non-healthcare front line workers before moving to people with high risk medical conditions.

Reprinted with permission of Wisconsin Examiner.