Thousands of new COVID-19 vaccination appointments in Waterloo Region expected to be filled quickly

Waterloo Public Health opened up close to 5,500 appointments for COVID-19 vaccinations on Friday at noon, although those are expected to be quickly filled.

The new appointments will allow people to be vaccinated at the Bingemans Hockey Hub Clinic in Kitchener as well as at the Cambridge Pinebush Clinic before Christmas Day.

With thousands of appointments coming open, the region is still going to have its hands full attempting to match demand amid the recent surge of COVID-19 due to the Omicron variant.

“What a difference a week makes. Last week, during my announcement, we had 40,000 appointments available for third doses,” Vickie Murray, who is leading the region’s vaccine efforts, told reporters Friday morning.

“As of today, every appointment available at a regional vaccine clinic is booked and when we open new appointments, they are immediately booked up.”

She said demand for the booster shots is currently outweighing the number of appointments that are available.

Currently, the option is only open for those in certain groups as well as people over the age of 50 but the province is opening the floodgates and on Monday, all those over the age of 18 become eligible.

“Effective Monday, December 20th, we will have approximately 350,000 people eligible to receive a third dose,” Murray said.

“Between today and January 20th, there are almost 42,000 appointments booked at our regional clinics.”

She said the region is looking for ways it can increase the number of appointments it can offer.

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“This week we have already had a significant increase in the number of daily vaccinations, doing 5,502 doses on Wednesday,” the woman heading the region’s vaccination efforts said.

“This is the most vaccinations that we have done on one day since July the 22nd, and it is twice as many per day as we were doing last week.”

She noted that local pharmacies have stepped up as well, conducting 2,964 vaccinations on Monday alone.

That said, it remains unclear how long it will take to clear the backlog of people who will want to get a first, second or third dose in the coming weeks as the Omicron tsunami arrives.

“It’s something that I’m spending every minute of every day working on,” Murray said.

“We want to ramp up as quickly as possible and I think everybody’s on board to do what it takes to make as many vaccination appointments available as possible.”

Even with a Herculean effort, it still might take some time to get there.

“You can take a look at the numbers, and we’re probably going to have to look at being able to do 20,000 vaccinations a day to meet the demand,” Murray said.

“But the most we’ve ever done was 10,000 a day once in July, so it feels like an almost impossible task, but it’s an impossible task that we’re committed to doing our best to meet.”