One last day to get first COVID vaccine shot at FEMA sites in Philadelphia
PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) -- Tuesday is the last day to walk into a FEMA-run vaccination clinic in Philadelphia to get your first dose of the Pfizer vaccine.
On Wednesday, FEMA switches over to second dose administration before it is scheduled departure from the city.
The two FEMA run vaccine sites in Philadelphia are at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Center City and the Esperanza Community Vaccination Center at 4261 N. 5th Street.
There are, however, roughly 250 sites across the city where you can receive the vaccine.
Jovanna Garcia with FEMA came to Philly from Texas to get the word out.
Action News spoke to her Monday afternoon as she was working to convince people to get vaccinated.
"There's about three to four people that said to me, 'I'm going to go and get my shot today.' So, I think that we did our job," said Garcia.
Monday's outreach brought FEMA to the Bethel Worship Center along West Wyoming Avenue. The congregation was distributing food boxes as FEMA employees shared knowledge.
In our tri-state area, COVID cases are falling compared to this time last month, our 6abc Data Journalism Team found.
Pennsylvania cases dropped by 20 percent in one month's time from 4,090 cases on April 1 to 3,270 cases on May 1.
New Jersey case counts dropped dramatically, from 4,649 cases in April to 1,660 infections in May.
Delaware case counts dropped 34% from 307 infections on April 1 to 242 cases May 1.
40.1% of all eligible Pennsylvanians are fully vaccinated. In New Jersey, that rate is at 45.5%.
41.7% of Delawareans are fully vaccinated as of May 1.
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But will we ever reach herd immunity?
Epidemiologist Dr. Marci Drees of ChristianaCare says likely not.
"It's a moving target because what was maybe trying for the mild-type COVID virus is different for the variants because some of them are clearly more transmissible," said Dr. Marci Drees.
"I think they are trying to move away from the term 'herd immunity' because it implies once you reach some magical threshold, COVID is just going to go away. We're pretty sure that just not going to happen," said Dr. Drees.
Now the focus is just getting as many people as possible vaccinated to stop variants from mutating and to get back to normal.
Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf partnered with the Flyers on Monday to get the message out.
"Vaccines are free even if you don't have health insurance, so I encourage all Pennsylvanians to get vaccinated as soon as possible," said Gov. Wolf.
