Harvard Moose Lodge set to become another of McHenry County’s COVID-19 vaccination sites

Harvard Moose Family Center is on track to become McHenry County’s next COVID-19 vaccination site, County Board Chairman Mike Buehler said Wednesday.

Bringing a clinic to Harvard was especially important as the county strives to provide all residents with equal access to the vaccine, particularly harder-hit or harder-to-reach populations, Buehler said.

“It’s absolutely important because of the demographics of Harvard itself as far as the Hispanic population has been pretty hard hit by [COVID-19] and we would like to have something that is more accessible for them to receive vaccines in addition to other residents of Harvard,” he said.

Harvard has the largest Hispanic population of any municipal area in McHenry County, with Hispanic residents accounting for about half of the population, according to U.S. Census data.

Hispanic residents in McHenry County have contracted COVID-19 at a rate of 938 positive cases per 10,000 people while a rate of 396 cases per 10,000 people is reported among white residents, according to the county’s COVID-19 dashboard.

Nationally, Hispanic or Latino people are 1.3 times more likely to contract COVID-19 and 2.3 times more likely to die from it, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In the fall, Harvard was one of two McHenry County municipalities determined to have been “disproportionately impacted” by the COVID-19 pandemic by the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.

The designation, assigned by ZIP code, was given to areas with high rates of COVID-19 infection per capita, as well as high rates in at least one of four poverty metrics relative to other nearby ZIP codes, said Lauren Huffman, spokeswoman for the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity.

In Harvard, 13.2% of residents were identified as living in poverty with a median income of just more than $53,000, according to 2018 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

In terms of COVID-19 infections, “we’ve always been almost double what a lot of other communities have been and what people here would attribute that to is that we are a working-class community,” Harvard School District 50 Superintendent Corey Tafoya said in an October interview.

A contract to use the Harvard Moose Lodge location has been drawn up and sent to the organization and Buehler said, after discussions with the lodge and Harvard Mayor Michael Kelly, he is all but certain they will sign it.

The addition of the site is emblematic of the county’s efforts to continue building vaccination capacity to prepare for a hopeful increase in doses from the state in the coming weeks, he said.

The county hopes to begin the work of outfitting the site for use as a vaccine clinic as soon as possible, he said. The last site to be added to the health department’s roster, an old Kmart building in McHenry, was transformed in just about two to three weeks and they are hoping to do the same here, Buehler said.