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Westchester County Executive George Latimer said that they will be expanding their vaccination efforts to include a new location at the community college on Grasslands road which is near the Mount Pleasant-Greenburgh town line.
Latimer noted that this will be the second county-run vaccination site, along with the Westchester County Center, where they've been administering approximately 1,000 doses each day to those eligible to receive the vaccine.
According to Latimer, the large campus will become more important as the original cohort who already received their first dose begin fulfilling appointments to take their second shot, completing the vaccination process.
It is unclear when the vaccination site at Westchester Community College will be up and running.
"We need additional space to help people, so it's important because we're going to have those who receive their first shots coming to receive their second shot," he said during a COVID-19 briefing on Thursday, Feb. 4. "So we're going to have to go back and revisit those original few thousand people in the first cohort to make sure they get their second shot."
Latimer also said that more space would help alleviate any glitches in the vaccination program, similar to the situation that the County Center saw this week following the nor'easter that forced the county to cancel appointments on Monday and Tuesday as a precaution and led to massive lines as they sought to double up on appointments later in the week.
"We do not want to have these lines. They were created because we lost Monday and Tuesday appointments for people because of the snow," he said. "We wanted to make sure those people got in and got their vaccination the week they had scheduled it, so we had to take those existing appointments and layer it on top of the 1,000 vaccinations, and there's no way to do that without lines."
During the briefing, Latimer reiterated that anyone who does not have a scheduled appointment to receive a COVID-19 vaccination at any of the county-run sites or pharmacies that have been administering doses should not just show up and expect to receive a shot.
"I repeat myself. Do not, under any circumstance, just go to a vaccination site. You will be rejected," he said. "There's not going to be leftover vaccines at the end of the day. We're making sure we give a vaccine to every single person and we plan on having none left at the end of the day.
"When you see the lines, it's not a managerial issue. We want to make sure anyone who registered to get a shot gets the shot within this tight time frame."
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