According to officials, as they await this week’s COVID-19 vaccine allocation, all doses currently designated for Nevada County have been scheduled to be administered, mostly in appointments which will take place next week.

But just because they’re been designated doesn’t mean they’ve arrived.

“We have 1,600 appointments scheduled this week, so we’re relying on doses that we don’t even have on-hand yet,” said Nevada County Health and Human Services Director Ryan Gruver. “We’re scheduling those out as soon as we know what our allocations are.”

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Gruver explained that, generally, the state informs the county of each week’s available dose allocation by email each week, either Tuesday or early Wednesday, at which point local vaccine providers are able to submit requests for those doses.

By Thursday of a regular week, said Gruver, “we have a plan” for the doses which arrive the following week.

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“We’re actively working with all our partners as well as with our own clinics to identify how many second-dose appointments we have coming up, how many first-dose appointments we can get out of the allocations that we’re getting, and pull them down on that cadence,” said Gruver.

As of Wednesday morning, however, the county had not yet been informed of this week’s first-dose allocation, according to Nevada County Public Health Officer Dr. Scott Kellermann.

Kellermann said it is difficult to track incoming shipments as well as doses in stock in particular, “until we get a unified system, where all providers are putting in the same data and the state is accessing that data similarly.”

Kellermann said he expects “quality data” from the state on vaccine figures such as allocations and disbursements will be more available in two to three weeks.

According to the state COVID-19 website, Nevada County is currently one of nine counties statewide in which appointments have been made available through the MyTurn system.

As of Wednesday, 16,300 doses have been administered to Nevada County residents, according to the state COVID-19 Vaccine Dashboard.

Victoria Penate is a staff writer for The Union, a sister publication of the Sierra Sun. She can be reached at vpenate@theunion.com.