T.O. takes vaccine push to the streets
Parks, subway stations, schools among sites for #DaysofVaxtion campaign
Months of efforts to vaccinate Toronto from COVID-19 are going into hyperdrive as city and health officials feverishly work to reach about 314,000 residents still unprotected from the virus.
To push the city toward 90 per cent of its eligible residents being fully vaccinated, they are taking the battle this week to schools, subway stations, parks, malls — even a bathhouse.
Dubbed #DaysofVaxtion, the blitz of pop-up COVID-19 vaccination clinics running Thursday to Sunday is aimed at vaccine holdouts who remain most at risk of infection and serious illness from the highly contagious Delta variant — and who, data says, are fuelling and prolonging the fourth wave of the pandemic.
The vaccination push is an aggressive “data-driven approach” aimed at those who remain vaccine hesitant or without access. Toronto Public Health estimates that’s about 10 per cent of the eligible population.
“There’s not much more to say other than get vaccinated if you haven’t been,” said Dr. Eileen de Villa, the city’s medical officer of health, at Wednesday’s press conference at city hall.
De Villa made the announcement with Mayor John Tory, launching the campaign Tory called a “mega-event” made up of a series of “micro clinics” — “smaller pop-up clinics put exactly where we know people need to get vaccinated and where we know people will be over the coming days.”
There are still 314,000 eligible Torontonians not yet fully vaccinated — 158,000 of those have yet to get even their first shot, Tory said Wednesday. The city is trying to get beyond the roughly 79 per cent currently vaccinated to the province’s 90 per cent target needed to stall growth of the Delta variant.
Coun. Joe Cressy, chair of the board of health, said polling and data collection have given vaccinators information about the people they need to target.
“We’re at just over 15 per cent of the eligible population left to vaccinate,” Cressy said. “Out of that 15 per cent, six per cent tell us they oppose vaccination, eight per cent tell us they’re open to the vaccine but they’re hesitant, and the outstanding roughly 1.5 per cent want the vaccine — we just haven’t got to them yet.”
Polling conducted last month for Toronto Public Health by Ipsos yields some insights on the eight per cent of people unvaccinated but open to the idea.
About half of them cited concerns about vaccination sideeffects, while one-fifth said they just didn’t yet know enough about the vaccine.
Toronto Public Health analysis shows vaccination rates are lower than average in neighbourhoods such as Rexdale and Jane-Finch with many frontline shift workers, Cressy said.
“People simply haven’t had the time to get their questions answered, or they don’t have those long-standing connections to the health system,” he said. “We need to reach them in different ways.”
Tory said #DaysofVaxtion sites were chosen using city data for areas that have low vaccination rates or where indicators suggest there is high risk of being infected. Organizers also looked for sites where Torontonians will pass by during their everyday lives.
For example, in Scarborough, Toronto Public Health and hospital partner staff will immunize people at eight mobile clinics Saturday including ones at four malls — Golden Mile, Bridlewood, Parkway and Cedarbrae.
Other pop-up clinic sites during the hyperlocal vaccination push include the Steamworks bathhouse on Church Street.
This week’s multi-clinic push follows the June mega-clinic at Scotiabank Arena that saw more than 26,000 vaccine doses administered in one day.
Ontario data shows that residents who have not yet had two vaccine doses are most at risk of being infected as well as getting seriously ill, and are driving the continued spread of COVID-19 that is prolonging the 18month-old pandemic.
“We want as many people to be protected from this terrible virus as possible,” Tory said.
Toronto is also banking on the province’s proof-of-vaccination certificate and mandates, along with vaccine mandates from many employers including the city itself, to help push the vaccination rate as high as possible.
Parts of Canada including Alberta, where political and health leaders did not impose as many restrictions or put as much of a focus on vaccination mandates, are suffering a crushing fourth wave, with overwhelmed intensive care units — a fate Ontario is trying to avoid.
De Villa said they are closely monitoring school cases of COVID-19 after students returned to in-class learning this September.
“Right now, our biggest concern is the new cases of COVID-19 that are emerging steadily in schools,” she said. “This is expected given the transmissibility of Delta and the population of students under 12 who, because of their age, can’t yet be vaccinated.”
While COVID-19 may likely cause a mild case in children, more severe cases do occur and the understanding of long COVID-19 is still evolving, de Villa said, so the best possible outcome is to avoid new cases as much as possible.