Chatham-Kent’s Chief Medical Officer of Health says a “substantial” amount of COVID-19 vaccine is coming C-K’s way.
Dr. David Colby told reporters during a conference call on Thursday, February 18, 2021 that a vaccine delivery is expected next week, along with the week after.
“There are some signals that the week after next is going to be substantial because they keep talking about the large number of Pfizer doses that have been sent from the Federal government to the Province,” Dr. Colby said.
“That is because the Pfizer plant was re-tooled in Europe to get higher production. Now we’re seeing the catch up for what we missed before.”
Dr. Colby added: “We need to wait to be notified by the Province about that. We’re eagerly awaiting for specific information as well. There are some hints and signals that we could be getting a fair bit of vaccine.”
Dr. Colby said completing the first priority group will be “job number one.
“The long-term care, high risk retirement homes and Indigenous elder care centre staff and essential care givers were always part of the first group to be vaccinated, but there wasn’t enough vaccine to do that. We were instructed to do residents only until vaccine supply stabilized,” he said.
Dr. Colby said mass vaccinations of citizens is expected to begin in April and be completed by September.
“(September) is the time when everybody who wants vaccine will have had the opportunity to have it by then,” he told reporters.
“We intend to start rolling this out and everything is dependent on vaccine supply all the way through. There has been a provincial prioritization document, with regard to how to decide when the supply of vaccines are lean, who gets it first in a fair, equitable manner and it’s a very long and complicated document and we’re kind of slogging through that right now to finalize our local plan.”
Dr. Colby said the mass vaccination site will be the John D. Bradley Convention Centre in Chatham, with others being setup as needed.
“I toured (the Bradley Centre) last Friday and I was very impressed with the entire setup and all the work that has been done there and I really think they are ready to go,” Dr. Colby said.
“We have provided in our plans for some pop-up vaccination clinics in other locations, but if we need a second mass vaccination site, again I think that would depend if we suddenly got a lot of vaccines that became available, we would not hesitate to set up another mass vaccination site. The WISH Centre is the obvious choice for that, with its proximity to clinic services and its spaciousness and availability.”
Chatham-Kent Public Health officials announced on Thursday that 914 doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered to date.
More details about the COVID-19 vaccine in Chatham-Kent can be found, here: https://ckphu.com/covid-19-vaccine/
