UK opening COVID-19 vaccine site in Kroger Field. K-12 teachers start next week.
The University of Kentucky will soon open a large COVID-19 vaccination site inside Kroger Field, UK President Eli Capilouto said in an email to campus on Friday.
Starting on Tuesday, UK HealthCare will centralize its vaccine distribution process to the football stadium, where the university has “significant parking and space to increase in a dramatic fashion the number of people being vaccinated,” Capilouto wrote in the email.
K-12 teachers and employees will begin to be vaccinated at the site starting next week, Capilouto said.
Additionally, members of the public will be able to request a vaccine appointment at Kroger Field by filling out an online questionnaire. Those who fill out the form will be added into a request database and then will be invited for a vaccine based on the state’s recommended distribution plan. The request form can be found at this link: https://ukhealthcare.uky.edu/covid-19/vaccine.
Those being vaccinated should park in the Blue Lot and then check in at Gate 11., after which those being vaccinated will proceed to a clinic in the Club Area on the first floor. The university is still working to determine the hours of operation, but the site will be open Monday through Saturday.
How will Lexington’s K-12 employees get in line?
Currently, both public and private schools in Fayette County are included, UK spokesperson Jay Blanton said. The university reached out to the schools today to make sure they had what they needed to “get in the queue.”
Acting Superintendent Marlene Helm said in an email to staff Friday that regardless of their participation in or choices on the vaccine survey that took place the week before winter break, every Fayette County Public School employee has the opportunity to participate in this vaccine offering. “As school district employees, we are fortunate to have been given priority in the distribution of this potentially life-saving vaccine. The vaccine is not mandatory, but it is highly recommended,” Helm said.
In the survey before winter break, Fayette County Public Schools’ employees requested 5,852 vaccinations. Seventy-six percent of certified employees, including teachers, and 53 percent of classified employees, including bus drivers and cafeteria staff, requested the vaccines, district officials said.
Fayette school board chairman Tyler Murphy said in a post Friday night that “this is an important and significant step forward in our ongoing effort to overcome this pandemic.“
As well as K-12 employees, UK will continue to prioritize vaccinations for “health care workers and providers at UK and in the community, as well as emergency first responders in the region. UK HealthCare has been designated by the state as a regional distribution center for this purpose,” Capilouto wrote.
How can someone request a COVID-19 vaccine at Kroger Field?
The university encourages those who request a vaccine through its online reqeust form to be patient as “it will still take several months to vaccinate everyone who wishes to be vaccinated,” the university’s webpage with the vaccine request form states.
After filling out the questionairre, a vaccine requester’s information will be entered into a database. UK HealthCare will evaluate individual requests and based on the state’s phased plan, the page states.
“Invitations will be issued on a rolling basis and are dependent on how many vaccines are allocated to UK HealthCare on a weekly basis and the number of qualified applicants in the queue,” the webpage states.
Vaccine invitations will come via email from UK HealthCare. Those who can’t access the online form or need assistance filling it out can call 859-218-0111.
Many UK healthcare employees have already been vaccinated
UK has vaccinated nearly 12,000 people so far, Capilouto wrote. The university has been receiving vaccine doses earlier and in larger quantities than anticipated, which he wrote was a “good thing” and “an incredible logistical challenge.”
As the university began to complete its list of health care employees to be vaccinated, officials began to look among the university’s researchers and healthcare colleges to identify more people to be potentially vaccinated.
“As you might imagine, we are managing thousands of names and reams of information and moving quickly to vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible, in accordance with the state’s parameters,” Capilouto wrote in the email. “At the same time, the state has – rightly – told us that we are to use every dose we get, each week, as quickly as possible. This is our commitment. That commitment is essential, as the vaccines must be refrigerated on site. And when they are taken out of that refrigeration, they must be administered quickly. It is not a perfect process now, and it will not be going forward. But we are working to make the process better each day. I am confident we will.”
Capilouto’s email comes after non-healthcare faculty, staff and students were vaccinated this week by the university as part of UK’s effort to follow state guidelines which direct providers to distribute available vaccine doses “as quickly as possible each week,” Blanton said earlier this week.
Some employees said they were so surprised to get vaccine invitations from the university this past week and were initially suspicious of the emails sent by UK HealthCare, and checked with their department IT personnel to verify that the email wasn’t a scam.
Blanton said Wednesday that those outside of healthcare settings receiving vaccine invitations included “faculty and staff over the age of 65, custodial and facilities staff who have high levels of in-person interactions on campus each day and members of our student services staff who support students in a number of critical roles.”
But some employees vaccinated Wednesday felt that they fell outside of those groups and were not completely sure as to why they’d been selected for a vaccine before other high-priority groups like local K-12 employees.
Peter Hislop, a 65-year-old mathematics professor who has been working from home and received his first shot on Wednesday, said he was surprised to find out that some of his younger colleagues in their mid-30s who also taught from home had also received invitations while others in their department didn’t. The selection of who received vaccines did not appear very “systematic,” he said prior to Capilouto’s Friday announcement.
“There seemed to be little rhyme or reason as to who had gotten it and who didn’t,” said Lauren Cagle, a professor of writing, rhetoric and digital studies who also has been working from home and also got the vaccine. Cagle, a member of the university’s United Campus Workers Union, said she learned from others in the union that many public-facing facilities and custodial staff had received the vaccine. She said she would’ve preferred if the university reached out to the union to assist in identifying employees who need the vaccine.
Some of those public-facing staff told WKYT, the Herald-Leader’s reporting partner, that they had received the vaccine and were grateful for it, especially with the semester’s start just over a week away.
The actual procedure of receiving the vaccine was generally fast-moving and efficient, said both Cagle and Hislop, who both went to walk-in appointments at Alumni Park Plaza. From walk-in to walk-out, Cagle estimated it took about half an hour. Hislop estimated that the wait-time, vaccination and subsequent observation period was close to 45 minutes total.
There are others in the community who are more deserving of the vaccine right now than professors who are able to work from home, said Hislop, who said he has two teenagers currently enrolled in Fayette County Public Schools.
Cagle said she was happy to receive the vaccine but also would’ve been happy to see it go to someone else.
“My mom, who is in the 65-plus category, lives here in town,” Cagle said. “And if I could have donated my vaccine to her yesterday I would have in a heartbeat.”
Ultimately though, Cagle said she is grateful to the scientists, researchers and administrators who have developed the vaccine and are being forced to make complicated decisions related to the vaccine’s rollout.
“And the bottom line is this: each person vaccinated – regardless of who they are – makes our people safer and our community healthier,” Capilouto wrote in the email.
This story was originally published January 15, 2021 at 6:43 PM.