Indiana is still receiving limited amounts of COVID-19 vaccines from the federal government, leading to a mismatch between supply and demand.

State Health Commissioner Dr. Kristina Box spoke at the weekly COVID-19 press conference Thursday about the status of vaccine distribution. She said that with high demand comes the need to level expectations.

“Rest assured that we will continue to request the amount of doses that the United States government will allow us to access. We will get those out as quickly as possible,” she said.

Available appointments are being filled quickly as the state receives doses of the vaccine and opens new slots. Currently vaccines are available for Hoosiers ages 70+ and people working in health care and law enforcement. A full eligibility list can be found here.

The next eligible group for vaccines will be Hoosiers ages 65 to 70, but state officials were unable to provide a timeline for when those appointments can be made. That five-year age group represents about 350,000 people.

“We find out on a Tuesday what our allocation for that week is and we work based on the numbers,” Dr. Box said. “For now, we continue to get 75,000 to 80,000 doses weekly.”

How many doses each county gets varies. Indiana Chief Medical Officer Dr. Lindsay Weaver said that distribution was first based on population, with 55 hospitals getting enough to serve counties around them. Now, Weaver said that number changes on a daily basis as they monitor counties’ uptake and how far they’re booked out with appointments.

“We took that same model when expanding and sending vaccines to local health departments,” Weaver said, making sure that health departments have the ability to put doses in arms.

“It’s not a stagnant number,” she said.

In Brown County, the health department was able to administer 210 doses the first week and was on track to do about that many this week.

Appointments are being booked as soon as they open, with many Brown Countians having to travel to a nearby county to get vaccinated instead.

“We would love to get more vaccines down here,” Brown County Emergency Management Director Susan Armstrong told the county commissioners this week. “Even if they add another (eligibility) category, we’re still limited to the number of vaccines we get every week. As soon as they open up slots, within a half-hour they are gone.”

Armstrong said they could “definitely handle quite a few more appointments during the day,” but they were limited to what they were getting from the state.

In just over a month’s time, more than 362,000 Hoosiers have received the first dose and 88,000 have received both. As of Jan. 22, 834 Brown County residents had received one dose and 149 had received both.

“As with any journey of a thousand miles,” Dr. Box said, “you take one step at at time.”