AUSTIN, Texas — Austin-Travis County's public health officials have plans to continue expanding mass vaccination site efforts.
Last weekend, Travis, Hays, Caldwell and Bastrop counties pooled their resources to host a 3,000-dose mass vaccination event at the Circuit of the Americas (COTA). A second event is underway this weekend at COTA, where the goal is to vaccinate 10,000 people.
Austin Public Health (APH) said in a press conference Friday morning that there are plans to open more mass vaccination sites in the future as bigger vaccine shipments come in.
APH Assistant Director Cassandra DeLeon said the department's incident management team is constantly reviewing, looking and planning for additional sites to be able to "stand up" to push out additional vaccine doses. She said, right now, the operations that APH has in place are sufficient for the vaccine applications that it receives and actually have more capacity than what the department has to provide as far as vaccines.
However, she said APH is currently staging and preparing to set up the Toney Burger Activity Center and Stadium as a vaccination site.
"That's something that we're planning in the next few weeks, to develop that as a new site. And we have reviewed Travis County Expo as another potential site. And in the fall, last fall, we actually practiced vaccine distribution at Travis County Expo Center in anticipation of using that location as a vaccine site for COVID-19. So, definitely, it's a constant, evolving process," DeLeon said. "We continue to look for locations to better meet the community's needs and to ensure that we have enough capacity to provide the vaccine as rapidly as we receive it."
APH Director Stephanie Hayden-Howard added that people have also reached out to the department saying that they would prefer a less massive vaccination site at a "smaller, intimate location," so the department is looking into that as well.
"In order to ensure that that we are providing a location where most people are comfortable, we are also looking at other relationships with the faith-based community as well to be able to provide vaccines there," Hayden-Howard said. "We know that from an equity perspective, we really need to meet people where they are and be able to provide those vaccines. So, we are looking at different options from mass, large scale to also smaller, more intimate environments."
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