The mass vaccination site at Memorial Gardens is expecting to cycle through about 120 people per hour beginning next week.
Jason Whiteley, chief of North Bay Fire and Emergency Services, has been working with arena staff for the past three weeks on setting up the arena to accommodate mass North Bay’s only mass immunization site.
“We wanted to ensure on the city side that we’d be ready to go and support the health unit,” Whiteley said.
Beginning Monday (March 22), vaccines will be administered to those over the age of 80. Appointments must be made through the Health Unit’s phone line or Ontario’s vaccine portal.
Whiteley says when someone arrives at Memorial Gardens for their vaccine appointment, they will enter through the main entrance and undergo COVID-19 screening.
From there, the person will be escorted inside the arena where the shots will be administered. Once someone receives their dose, they will have to sit in a “holding area” for 15 minutes to ensure there are no immediate side effects or reactions from the vaccine.
After that, the person will be ushered out the rear of the building back to the parking lot.
The whole process, Whiteley estimates, will take “at least 30 minutes” per person.
Whiteley adds accommodations have been made for those with mobility issues, with a separate vaccination area dedicated for those individuals.
“The biggest challenge was knowing when we were going to get a vaccine,” the fire chief said. “After we did all the measurements and worked through the flow, it was quite easy and quite quick.”
Whiteley and the fire crew have been assisting in many of the pandemic measures the city has undertaken over the past year.
“Throughout this whole pandemic, different groups within the city have stepped up to make things work temporarily or permanently as things have unfolded,” he said. “It’s our role to ensure the emergency plan is ready to go and to put the right people together to support our city’s people and businesses, especially during a pandemic like this.”
“The amount of people and moving parts that have come together to make sure we have an adequate response to this I think has been great,” Whiteley added.
Mayor Al McDonald says plans to turn the arena into a vaccination site are similar to that seen in 2009 during the H1N1 epidemic.
“We do have a template in place. We’re ready to go,” he stated.
