The University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics will be among the first of Iowa’s health care organizations to receive limited doses of the COVID-19 vaccine and those first doses will be given to employees. Health system C-E-O Suresh Gunasekaran says they expect to get around one-thousand doses of the vaccine and have divided employees up in groups. Those providing care to COVID patients will be the first to get vaccinated sometime next week.

The U-I healthcare system has 18-thousand employees overall and Gunasekaran says they are not sure how long it would be before they would have enough doses of the vaccine to give to all of them.  The vaccine has to be kept very cold and he says that will not be a problem — as they have enough storage for at least 50-thousand doses.