How having COVID-19 clinic in downtown Modesto beats the Scenic Drive operation
The move of the COVID-19 vaccination clinic in Modesto from Scenic Drive to Centre Plaza has a number of things going for it, county and city officials said Sunday as they set up to start offering inoculations downtown on Monday morning.
There won’t be the traffic concerns seen on Scenic on Thursday and Friday as a steady stream of drivers pulled into the parking lot. Parking, too, should be much better, given there’s a large lot at Centre Plaza, as well as the nearby garages on Ninth and Tenth streets.
The plaza also is a bit more centrally located to serve residents from south, west and north Modesto, Stanislaus County Supervisor Mani Grewal and city spokesman Thomas Reeves said Sunday afternoon.
And most important, they said, is the space the facility offers. Though the great majority of the many hundreds who are expected to line up still will be outside, more people should be able to safely wait indoors. Also, a much bigger post-vaccination monitoring room will increase the throughput of the vaccination process.
On Thursday, the vaccination rate was 215 people per hour, Kamlesh Kaur, spokeswoman for the county Health Services Agency. With 260 chairs set up in the larger post-vaccination monitoring room at Centre Plaza, that rate should increase, because that’s where any bottleneck was.
Help from the Modesto Fire Department also is speeding up the operation, Reeves said. EMTs and paramedics staffing the evaluation room, ready to assist anyone who has an adverse recation to the vaccine, allows nurses to do what they are most needed to do: give shots. Those emergency medical responders also will be trained to administer the vaccine themselves.
The county is in Phase 1A of the vaccine rollout, serving Stanislaus residents 65 and older, as well as front-line health care workers who live or work in the county. Grewal said seniors should bring ID that shows they live in the county, and health workers should have proof of residence or workplace.
Grewal said the county learns on Thursdays how many doses it will have to offer the next week, and he said he’s confident there’s enough to meet anticipated demand this week at Centre Plaza and a clinic that will start Tuesday at California State University, Stanislaus, in Turlock.
On Thursday at the Scenic Drive clinic, 1,630 doses were administered, he said, and on Friday, the number was 1,662, Grewal said.
The county’s initial goal for the Scenic facility was 1,000 doses a day, he said. But once they saw the demand, county CEO Jody Hayes and Sheriff Jeff Dirkse, who heads the Office of Emergency Services, said that anyone in line at 5 p.m. should be vaccinated, even if it meant keeping the clinic open later, the supervisor said.
Opening additional clinics, as the county is working on in Oakdale and Patterson, should help balance out demand and keep lines at any one spot from getting too bad, Grewal said.
Clinic hours at Centre Plaza will be 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays, including Monday, which is the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Hours at the Stanislaus State clinic, which opens Tuesday and will be held in the campus’s Fitzpatrick Arena in Turlock, are 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week, including holidays, through July 31.
Appointments are not needed at either site, and vaccines will be provided on a first-come, first-served basis
This story was originally published January 17, 2021 at 2:26 PM with the headline "How having COVID-19 clinic in downtown Modesto beats the Scenic Drive operation."
