KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Douglas County is the most vaccinated county in the state of Kansas.
According to the KDHE website, Douglas County sits at 470.1 per 1,000 people vaccinated. The website clarifies that these are people with at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose.
Johnson County is 331.2 per 1,000. Wyandotte County sits at 233.2 per 1,000.
The Douglas County Health Department said the reason their rate is so high, is due to the willingness to get the vaccine. The department clarified it has nothing to do with the amount of doses it's getting.
"I think it starts with [the fact that] we've been operating under a system of unified command for over a year now, and that means that we've had our partners with us all along," Dan Partridge, director of the Lawrence-Douglas County Health Department said. "So the city, the county, school district, the university, the chamber all have been supporting this work from the very beginning."
Partridge has advice to other counties that might be having a hard time vaccinating people.
"It has to be convenient. You gotta check the boxes around convenience and barrier reduction," Patridge said. "When a person shows up here at the clinic, within 10 minutes they've been vaccinated and are sitting in the monitoring waiting to go. That's when we're pushing 600 or 700 cars of ours through. It's that you can get it done quickly and that you do it in your car, we see that as as things that are making us unique and perhaps desirable."
Douglas County is home to the University of Kansas. The county department said college students is one group that is not very willing to get the vaccine.
"When we look back of the vaccines by age and different things, that's an age group that we've got work to do and that's one of our more under vaccinated groups," Partridge said.
This past week was the first time Douglas County did not fill all available COVID-19 vaccine appointments. Click here to sign up, if you live in Douglas County.
