Update from Governor Carney on Vaccination Progress

Leaders of the General Assembly and Health Chairs,

I wanted to provide an update on today’s events in Delaware City and Georgetown. Please share with your caucuses.

We made a series of changes overnight that seem to be improving throughput and making things run more smoothly.

• To avoid technology problems related to the cold temperatures, Georgetown has switched to a paper-based system for today. That means we will have a lot of data entry to do on the back end, and our numbers from this weekend will be delayed in showing up on our vaccine tracker, but it will keep the lines moving. In Delaware City, we’re using a generator to keep laptops charged and wifi operating efficiently.
• We’ve added laptops and IT personnel at the Delaware City site.
• We created a separate line for 1As in Delaware City to avoid congestion.
• Constituents began arriving as early as three hours before the pods started this morning (scheduled for 10am). In Georgetown, staff arrived early and began checking people in and vaccinating them at 8:30am — an hour and a half before we’d planned to — just to stay ahead of the curve and avoid a backlog due to the early arrivals.
• We’ve added state troopers in both locations to assist with traffic flow.
• We sent an email early this morning to everyone who had appointments today with instructions for completing the pre-registration forms. Anecdotally, there seems to be a higher compliance rate today, which is expediting the process on site.

We are still experiencing traffic delays in both locations, but it’s much improved from yesterday.

We will undoubtedly continue to experience challenges as we work to make this very complicated process efficient for everyone, so we appreciate your continued patience.

Thanks,

Sheila

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Chief of Staff

Governor John Carney