Mar 11, 2021 2 min read

CALIFORNIA – The Pennsylvania National Guard will be deployed Saturday in Washington County to assist in a COVID-19 vaccine clinic for school employees.

The Guard will lend its services at the Intermediate Unit 1 clinic at California Area High School, designed to vaccinate elementary school teachers and their support staffs, said Donald Martin, the IU’s executive director.

“Our school community has just been through so much,” Martin said Wednesday.

Gov. Tom Wolf has dedicated the state’s share of the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine to public and private school teachers, as well as bus drivers and janitors.

The IU1, which serves Washington, Fayette and Greene counties, will receive 3,000 doses in the first round of the J&J distribution.

The clinic will operate Sunday through Thursday and have the ability to vaccinate 1,880 people in the first two days, Martin said.

“The whole goal was to get the elementary schools open,” he said.

He said the Guard likely has not been deployed to the Mon Valley since the Election Day flood on the Monongahela River in 1985.

The virus has killed 24,439 Pennsylvanians since March 2020 after 43 new statewide deaths were reported Wednesday, none of which occurred in Washington, Greene or Fayette counties.

There were 2,504 new virus cases announced statewide, bringing the cumulative total to 955,730.

Washington County reported 44 new virus cases, taking its total to 14,047. Fayette added 17 new cases to its total of 10,657. Greene’s case-count grew by three to 2,720.

Meanwhile, there were no new virus deaths reported in Allegheny County, where daily case-counts have declined to about 160 as compared to 170 last week.

The county’s Health Department has been administering about 2,000 vaccines a day, said its director, Dr. Debra Bogen.