ESSEX, Md. — Even the president of CCBC Essex had to wait in line for six weeks to get the vaccine, and now Dr. Sandra Kurtinitis prepares to return to a bit of life as normal.
“I’m looking forward to going skiing with my children in a month and they’ve already had their two doses,” said Kurtinitis. “I will have had mine, and yes, it feels liberating.”
The walls of the Wellness and Athletic Center on campus are filled with championship banners, but now the real heroes are administering shots here, 1500 of them, at the county’s third vaccination site, and it has the capacity to do far more.
“So this will be, I believe, on Fridays, one day a week, and again, it’s just a shortage of doses that are available,” said Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski. “We’re optimistic with what seems to be the pending approval of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine that we might see an additional amount of supply.”
The county only receives five thousand total shots per week that it also uses to supply clinics at the state fairgrounds and in Reisterstown, and it has 250,000 people on its waiting list, but eventually, the hope is people can land a shot in their own community.
“When we get an allocation of vaccine, we spread it across all three sites and then we take the master registry and we pull names down from that and then the link from that site is sent to the master list so that people do usually have an option,” said Deputy Health Officer Della Leister.
For people without transportation, the county announced it will use federal grant money to pay for Uber rides to get their shots.
