Longs Drugs will be offering COVID-19 vaccinations at seven Hawaii pharmacies starting on Thursday, Feb. 11, with locations in Honolulu, Kaneohe, Hilo, Kahului and Kapaa expected to receive a total of 4,400 doses.
On Tuesday, Feb. 9, CVS, the parent company of Longs Drugs, will post on the company’s website the specific locations where residents can receive the vaccinations, according to coverage by KITV. Registration will begin that same day.
“It will certainly alleviate a lot of the backup that may be happening at the sites that are going on. And especially for my patients definitely convenient,” Dr. Noelani Hobbs, a community doctor in Waipahu, said according to KITV. “A lot of them can certainly get to a CVS before they can go all the way down to the Blaisdell or sometimes to the hospital. If we think about it, my older patients are really relying mostly on family members and friends to get them to where they need to go.”
Registration can be accomplished either on the CVS website or through the company’s pharmacy app, according to KITV. For those without access to either of those options, there is also a phone-in registrations available by calling 800-746-7287.
Those seeking a vaccination muse register ahead of time, as walk-in vaccinations will not be permitted, according to KITV.
Yet, even as the federal government is seeking to boost vaccine distribution through direct weekly allocations to states, Sarah Kemble, Department of Health acting state epidemiologist, said the need remains greater than the supply, especially with the new threat of mutations and the potential for treatment-resistant strains, according to KITV.
“The amount that we're seeing this week announced through the pharmacy program is still not a great number,” Kemble said. “So we're still hoping to see more allocation in the coming weeks that will really start to move the needle."