You wouldn’t know from just a glance around downtown Marysville that Marshall County residents are getting their COVID-19 vaccination at a higher rate than nearly every other place across Kansas.
There are rarely visible lines for doses.
Sure, the county health department pulled off successful mass vaccination clinics in Marysville’s historic train depot early on in the vaccine rollout. But most days, the department sees just a trickle of people coming in. Even those numbers have been dropping a bit.
Nor do county residents seem especially wary of the pandemic. Outside of the health department, face masks were a rare site in many areas in early summer.
Yet Marshall County has emerged as one of the state’s biggest success stories in terms of getting a large percentage of county residents vaccinated against COVID-19. More than half of the county’s 9,800 people have received at least one dose of a vaccine, according to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. That’s more than 6 percentage points higher than the state’s overall rate of about 44%.
About 48% of residents have completed a vaccination series, well above the state average of 39% and more than any other county in Kansas as of July 6.
Marshall County’s experience challenges a narrative that conservative areas of the U.S. are more reluctant to get the vaccine than those living in urban and suburban areas. It joins a handful of other red, rural Kansas counties – about 73% of Marshall County voters cast ballots to reelect President Donald Trump in 2020 — that are also achieving high vaccination rates.
The county’s success isn’t being driven by anything attention-grabbing, such as the vaccine lotteries that other states have been using. If you ask local health officials and community leaders, there is no single reason for it. Instead, a network of existing infrastructure that predates not just the vaccination process but the pandemic itself is a huge factor.
“The health care in a community is about an entire system; it’s not just one department. Part of that system is our press is good, our health department is good, our hospital is good, our care homes are outstanding,” County Commissioner Barb Kickhaefer says.
The way Sue Rhodes, a registered nurse and the administrator of the Marshall County Health Department, sees it, the high vaccination rate can be traced back to decades of work in the county to build a health care system built on trust, community partnerships and neighborly connections.
“We went at it that these are our people, and we need to take care of them,” Rhodes says.
ONE interesting dynamic is that Marshall County residents already depended on the health department for vaccinations long before there was COVID-19 or even a vaccine for it. The department’s staff of nurses has regularly provided age-specific and annual immunizations. That’s unusual because people don’t usually go to a local health department for their flu shots, choosing primary care physicians or a pharmacy instead.
“There’s no one or no place in our county that gets vaccines,” Rhodes says, “so we vaccinate 90% of the county.”
When it came time to start giving COVID-19 vaccines to the general community in the early months of 2021, people were already used to making a trip to downtown Marysville for an immunization appointment. Marysville is the county seat and largest city, but Marshall County is also home to Blue Rapids, Frankfort, Waterville, Axtell and a few other small towns.
The goal of the health department throughout that process was the same as it had been with any other vaccination effort.
