Up to 2,000 COVID vaccinations per day can be administered at Sarnia-Lambton's new mass vaccination clinic.
The Clearwater Arena clinic, operated by Lambton EMS, Lambton Public Health and Bluewater Health, opened its doors Friday morning.
Bluewater Health's Nadine Neve took the lead on getting the site up and running. She said it will likely be operational for around a month-and-a-half.
"It all depends on second doses, how many more we need to do and uptake, but we're doing great here in Sarnia-Lambton, so I think we will probably run for between five and seven weeks here, at least."
Neve said they had around 1,450 shots scheduled for Friday, and that they'll increase daily shots in increments.
"So today is about 1,450, tomorrow will be a higher number, and then we'll keep going as we see how it's working and make changes as needed."
The Wellington Street clinic features 90 pods, compared to 60 at the Point Edward Arena clinic. Neve said the health organizations have learned a lot from the community's first mass vaccination site.
"Just about how to do our clinical screening, how fast the immunizers need to be, and really just mimicking a lot of the things that we did in Point Edward to this site. So it's very similar and it's scalable -- we can go up, we can go down, based on the vaccine we have that day or that week."
The Point Edward site, which launched in late March, conducts around 1,200 vaccinations every day.
Neve said the Clearwater clinic needs between 50 to 60 clinical and non-clinical staff each day to operate, along with around 60 volunteers.
"We basically have the volunteers do mobility management, so anybody that needs to come through the site in a wheelchair. They manage parking and assist with accessible parking outside, and then they're way-finders in the building -- so every point that someone needs to know where to go next, there's a volunteer to help them with that."
Over 300 residents have registered to volunteer at the clinic, including retired teacher Tessa Catton.
"What's blown me away is they've had firefighters, paramedics, all of the health people in the world -- it's so professional," said Catton. "You take a look at all this stuff around you -- the walls, they got the chairs, they got the timers -- everything is a coordinated effort and it is staggering, because I had no idea the effort it would take to be involved."
Volunteer Tessa Catton at the high-output immunization clinic at Clearwater Arena.
Catton said she has spent time volunteering with Seaway Kiwanis and other community groups.
"So when this call came out, I said 'I have to volunteer,' because I'm a busy person and it hasn't been that busy."
Catton said she signed up to be a vaccination bay cleaner because it's a position where she gets to talk to everybody, it's low-key, and it's needed.
Lambton Public Health said that as of Thursday, 112,779 doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been administered to area residents, representing 72 per cent of adults with at least one shot and 29 per cent who are fully vaccinated.
