The county leading Minnesota in vaccination rate is not in the metro.
It’s Cook County along Minnesota’s North Shore where 82% of residents have at least one dose.
Rural counties lag behind the leaders, some significantly so like Todd County where just 38% have started the series. Cook County has done it with just two clinics and one hospital.
“Getting the word out to people, letting them know when they’re eligible, giving them an easy way to sign up, and trying to make it all very streamlined,” Cook County Public health Supervisor Grace Grinager said, describing the county’s approach. “We’ve been at it for quite some time, since December of last year and the work still continues.”
About one-third of the 5,400 year round residents are 65 and older which aided the vaccination rate.
“That’s the group with the highest vaccination rate in our community,” Grinager said. “There was a lot of early interest in getting the vaccine in that group, but I think it’s extended to younger age demographics as well.”
It was one year ago when state health officials were cautioning travel to rural areas, concerned a positive case from a metro area visitor could spark an outbreak and overwhelm a rural healthcare system. On the North Shore, tourism is now rebounding.
“The fact that we have such a high percentage of our workforce and our population vaccinated definitely helps people feel more comfortable about welcoming large numbers of tourists in our busiest time of year,” Grinager said. “I think that was also part of the motivation. People want to feel safe and comfortable at work and vaccination is a way to help us get there.”
While recent research has shown that people who got the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines could be protected for years, public health experts are concerned that with not enough people vaccinated, the virus will continue to circulate in low-vaccinated areas. State officials nationwide have continued to spend money and find ways to reach people, many of whom live in rural areas, to get their doses. Cook County is an outlier.
“We all were kind of aware up here of our shared vulnerabilities in terms of being a rural remote community where it takes a couple of hours for us to drive to access that higher level of intensive care if one were to become seriously ill with COVID,” Grinager said. “We all took the pandemic very seriously. Obviously it isn’t 100% of the population, but I think that, by and large, people really banded together to try to do what they could to effectively confront this really challenging year and that included vaccinations.”
Statewide, almost 67% of residents 16 and up have at least one dose.