The Pritzker administration acknowledges geographic disparities but said officials are doing their best to manage them. So many suburbanites were signing up for shots at the United Center in Chicago that city officials began limiting slots based on where people live, favoring city residents from hard-hit ZIP codes. The disparities in supply and demand have prompted sizable numbers of people to travel across county lines, at times driving for hours, to get shots in places with more availability. That helped those areas boost their vaccination rates. The state released some data showing that some counties, including Adams, received far more doses than others in proportion to population size. There are no easy explanations for these differences, in part because the process of distributing doses remains mired in confusion and secrecy. That’s an improvement from the early stages of the vaccination campaign, when a previous Tribune review found Illinois was struggling to keep pace with most states. Roughly 13% of Illinois’ entire population is now fully vaccinated, placing Illinois first among the 10 largest states based on the most recent federal data. In suburban Cook County, the rate is half that, and it’s even worse in most of the collar counties. Quincy is in Adams County, where 27% of its residents were fully vaccinated as of Friday, the best rate in Illinois. Three months into Illinois’ mass vaccination program, the striking differences between those two sites - in northwest suburban Des Plaines and downstate Quincy - illustrate the frustratingly uneven pace of vaccinations across the state. More than 200 miles away, a site on Illinois’ western border has plenty of openings and regularly welcomes any state resident who qualifies for a shot. One mass vaccination site in the Chicago suburbs has been so overwhelmed that the first slots were quickly snapped up and openings have remained scarce, even with tightened eligibility rules.
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