Ottawa Public Health is calling out to local health workers to lend a hand to get needles into arms as the demand for COVID-19 booster shots eclipses capacity in the city.
Dr. Vera Etches, Ottawa’s medical officer of health, told reporters Thursday that the city is ramping up its mass vaccination campaign once again in an attempt to get as much third-dose protection as possible in the nation’s capital as the Omicron COVID variant spreads through the city.
The city has doubled its total vaccination capacity this week compared to last, Etches said, with the city’s emergency operations centre shifting back into high gear to handle the demand for boosters.
OPH is setting up a new vaccination site at the EY Centre to administer 2,700 vaccine doses a day and on Thursday released 10,600 new appointments for boosters in the city, with slots open as early as Saturday.
OPH has been releasing thousands of new appointments per day since Monday when the threshold dropped to allow anyone aged 50 and older who is six months removed from their second dose to book a booster shot.
Many hopeful residents have been shut out by lagging websites and slots snapped up too quickly to grab. Etches said even if it’s slow, every resident who’s eligible will be able to get a booster in due course.
The demand will be even greater starting Monday when 750,000 people in Ottawa aged 18 and older who got second doses at least three months ago become eligible for a booster shot.
What’s constraining OPH’s ability to open up more slots is not the availability of doses, but rather people to administer the shots, Etches said.
“There’s no challenge with the supply of vaccines for the Ottawa clinics. The challenge is the number of immunizers.”
The health unit has been working with hospital partners, paramedics, family physicians, pharmacies and even med students to get as many people to staff clinics as possible.
OPH employees from across the organization are dropping their usual workload and rushing to the front lines of the vaccination campaign once again, which is diminishing the health unit’s regular services, such as mental health and substance use support.
“It’s not ideal, but that’s how critical this work is right now,” Etches said.
Etches said it was “bittersweet” to be talking about the looming threat of Omicron in Ottawa one day after the one-year anniversary of the first COVID-19 shot administered in the city, but reiterated that the vaccination progress made locally in the past 366 days has been a “colossal feat.”
“This is a massive undertaking. We’ve done it before and we’ll do it again.”