NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The Tennessee Department of Health rolled out a new dashboard so people can track the progress of COVID-19 vaccinations in the state.
The COVID-19 vaccine reporting dashboard goes live Friday afternoon and will be updated every Tuesday and Friday. TDH Director Dr. Lisa Piercey said daily state COVID-19 statistics, though, will now be reported later in the day no later than 6 p.m. ET starting immediately.
The dashboard will be available at this link when it goes live.
The new COVID-19 vaccine dashboard will be sparse at first since the state only just received its first shipment of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. In the coming weeks as more vaccines are administered, though, Piercey said the data will be more meaningful when people become fully vaccinated, and the dashboard will become more fleshed out with interactive county-by-county snapshots.
The dashboard will report how many vaccines total have been administered across the state, the percentage of a county's population that has been fully vaccinated with both doses of the Pfizer or Moderna shots, and reports broken down by age, race, ethnicity and sex. It will also show how many vaccines were given in public settings such as county health departments, and which were given in private settings such as hospitals and pharmacies.
Vaccines will be reported by a person's county of residence rather than where the vaccine was physically received.
Dr. Piercey said the county is looking forward to receiving a sizable shipment of the Moderna vaccine starting Monday. Once it is granted emergency approval, she said it will be given to the roughly 40 hospitals across the state that were unable to receive the Pfizer vaccine. Because the Moderna vaccine does not require special cold storage equipment, she said it will be more accessible to smaller hospitals that lack the ability to store it.
The state is holding a percentage of the vaccines in reserve in case of emergency, such as if something goes wrong with one of the shipments and its vaccines spoil, or a major outbreak occurs somewhere in the state requiring immediate attention to protect high-risk patients.
"We need as many people to get vaccinated as possible,” Piercey said, saying the more people who receive it, the less likely it will spread in the future. "We’re looking for population coverage here.”