IOUX CITY -- Data from the Iowa Department of Public Health shows that Woodbury County is behind the state's other large counties in getting COVID vaccines in residents' arms.
As of Friday, 7,052 doses of vaccine have been administered to Woodbury County residents. This figure represents doses only -- some residents have already received both doses, while others have received only one.
Woodbury County is ninth in the state in this measure, despite being the sixth-largest county in Iowa by population. In Story, Dallas and Dubuque counties, which each have populations smaller than Woodbury County, more vaccine doses have been administered -- 9,864 doses have been administered to Dubuque County residents, for example.
In Polk County, the most populous in the state, 45,058 doses have been administered to county residents. This is well over six times as many doses as Woodbury County, despite Polk County's population being less than five times as large.
It's not entirely clear what's behind the lag in Woodbury County's numbers, though a pair of large-scale public vaccine clinics, where roughly 3,000 doses are set to be administered, are scheduled for next week in Sioux City.
"I can tell you that our healthcare community felt it would be most effective to pool our local resources and distribute the vaccine via large public clinics. So we’ve been accumulating vaccine to accommodate the large clinic setting," Tyler Brock, deputy director of the Siouxland District Health Department, wrote in an email Friday.
