OTTAWA -- The city of Ottawa is preparing to ramp-up the COVID-19 vaccine rollout as Ontario anticipates all adults over 18 will be eligible to receive the COVID-19 by the end of May.

“We were able to confirm our new supply, so we opened up 80,000 more spots for eligible residents in all of our clinics from May 1 to 28. So we’re continuing to march along,” said Anthony Di Monte, Ottawa’s general manager of emergency and protective services.

“We’ve also designated another 15,000 doses for our high-risk communities.”

Residents 60 and over living in Ottawa are eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine at community clinics. Effective Tuesday, residents 45 and over living in hot spots K1T, K1V and K2V became eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine at community clinics.

Starting Thursday, child care workers in licensed child care settings are also eligible to book an appointment through the provincial booking line.

The Ontario government announced Thursday that anyone aged 55 and older will be able to book the COVID-19 vaccine through the provincial portal starting Friday. Officials anticipate moving the age threshold to book an appointment at community clinics to new age groups each week in May.

  • May 3: Residents aged 50 and over can book an appointment at community immunization clinics
  • May 10: Residents aged 40 and over can book an appointment at community immunization clinics
  • May 17: Residents aged 30 and over can book an appointment at community immunization clinics
  • May 24: Residents aged 18 and over can book an appointment at community immunization clinics 

Speaking on CTV Morning Live Thursday morning, Di Monte said Ottawa is ready to vaccinate new age groups.

“Here in Ottawa we’re almost completed, when you look at the number of 60 year-olds we’ve done we’re not quite completed, but a good portion of them we think have been completed now so it would be time to go down to the next group,” said Di Monte.

Ottawa Public Health says 70 per cent of residents aged 60 to 69 have received one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, while 39 per cent of residents 50 to 59 had received at least one dose.

As of Wednesday, 306,000 Ottawa residents had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, accounting for 35 per cent of eligible residents over the age of 16. 

Nonetheless, Di Monte acknowledged there have been challenges with the vaccine rollout.

“Every day there are some challenges. We had some significant challenges last week with regards to, as you know, there was a delay for Pfizer, Moderna didn’t show up so we kind of juggling appointments and everything, a lot of work done behind the scenes,” said Di Monte.

“Our mantra here has been, ‘We don’t want the public to be inconvenienced.’ We saw in other communities where appointments were given and had to be cancelled, thousands of people put out. When we put appointments in the system, we know we have the vaccine, so we were juggling a little bit last week, that got stabilized and that’s why I can tell you this morning we have 80,000 new appointments.”

Di Monte says while the main challenge has been the COVID-19 vaccine supply arriving in Ottawa this spring, operations at the community clinics are running “smoothly.”

“We’re ready to ramp up again. I keep telling people this, it’s not about the capacity here – we’ve only got four clinics open, we can go to seven. We’ve got a plan for a drive-in (vaccination clinic), we can run these systems 24 hours if we had to, but we can’t do any of that if we don’t have the vaccine to do that,” said Di Monte.

“The system is ready, the teams are ready and we have our infrastructure ready to go.”

JOHNSON AND JOHNSON COVID-19 VACCINE

The first shipment of the Johnson and Johnson COVID-19 vaccine arrived in Canada on Wednesday.

Di Monte says the city of Ottawa doesn’t know if any doses will be shipped to the city, but it will be a “game changer” for the vaccine rollout.

“We’re looking at people, some of the homeless communities, some of these areas that are difficult to get back twice, maybe some of our higher-risk areas where it may be a better product to use,” said Di Monte when asked where the city will deploy the Johnson and Johnson vaccine.