Drive-thru COVID vaccination site to open in May

Drive-thru COVID-19 vaccinations will be offered beginning May 11 at Texas Station in North Las Vegas, the first such mass inoculation site in Clark County.

Shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will be given from 7 a.m. until noon seven days a week for three weeks, said Greg Cassell with the Southern Nevada Health District. Second doses will be offered at the site three weeks after an initial dose.

The Nevada National Guard and the Southern Nevada Health District will be operating the site at 2101 Texas Star Lane, Cassell said during a Friday morning briefing with news media.

The drive-thru approach is aimed at people looking for an easier way to be vaccinated than walk-up sites but who don’t meet the criteria for a county program that is vaccinating homebound individuals, Cassell said.

Or, for some people, “maybe they want to bring the whole family in at one time,” he added.

The site will have the capacity to vaccine 1,000 or more people a day

“We’re hopeful that people will come, but we don’t exactly know how many people will show up,” Cassell said.

Demand for vaccination in the county has waned after an initial rush after April 5, when vaccination eligibility was expanded in Nevada to everyone 16 and older. A similar trend is being experienced around the country.

Vaccinations for the drive-thru site will be by appointment, which will be available at www.snhd.info/covid-vaccine. Some vaccination slots may be available at the end of the day without appointment if supplies last.

In another development, as of Thursday the district said had identified 73 cases of the coronavirus in people who had been fully vaccinated, representatives said. These are referred to as breakthrough cases.

The number represents about 1 in 10,000 people vaccinated. Data from clinical trials for the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines indicated that their vaccines protected 19 out of 20 people from infection, and most people from serious disease. The Johnson and Johnson single-dose vaccine was somewhat less effective in preventing disease, but also highly effective in protecting against serious symptoms.

To date, more than 1.3 million doses of vaccine have been administered in Clark County through health district sites, pharmacies, hospitals and other locations, according to the health district’s website.

About 45 percent of Clark County’s eligible population — people age 16 and older — have received at least one dose of the vaccine, according to the district.

Officials want more people to get vaccinated, stressing that once 60 percent of the county’s eligible population has received one dose of the vaccine, social distancing and capacity restrictions would be removed in accordance with a local mitigation plan.

Statewide, about 1.8 million vaccine doses have been administered, with nearly 757,000 vaccinations reported as completed of the single dose Johnson &Johnson vaccine or the double-dose Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, according to the state’s COVID-19 data portal.

About 23 percent of the state’s population is fully vaccinated, including 29 percent of those age 16 and older.

Contact Mary Hynes at mhynes@reviewjournal.com. Follow @MaryHynes1 on Twitter.