Houston health officials expect to vaccinate about 3,600 people in one place on Saturday, tripling what the city did on any given day, Mayor Sylvester Turner said.
The Houston Department of Health partnered with the Astros Foundation on Saturday to run Minute Maid Park as a Covid-19 vaccination site after the Bayou City Event Center Clinic ‘closed’ for an unrelated weekend event, “reads” a statement from the Department of Health.
The Minute Maid Park site is only open to people already employed at the Bayou City Event Center, the statement said.
“We are going to be able to do up to about 3600 today, which will be significantly more than we did,” Mayor Turner said.
The city’s health department opened about 1,000 additional appointments for Saturday’s vaccination clinic and within about 20 minutes the slots were booked, Turner said.
The new appointments have been made available due to an additional 1,000 doses of vaccine delivered to the health department on Friday.
“It was unexpected in terms of timing, we expected it to come in next week,” Turner said.
“We’ve already seen 727 people, which is more than we see in a day at the Bayou Center,” said Stephen Williams, director of the Houston Department of Health.
Vaccines will be administered to groups 1A and 1B, including health workers, residents over the age of 65 and people 16 and older with medical conditions, Turner said.