Windsor's mayor says he's "sounding the alarm bell" over a lack of COVID-19 vaccine doses for the region, calling on the federal government to increase the supply.
Drew Dilkens told AM800's The Morning Drive that he was informed Tuesday by the Windsor-Essex County Health Unit that we're projected to only receive 10,000 doses a week, every week until the end of May.
Dilkens says that's six more weeks where we're actually not ramping up capacity, we're actually dialling it down. As a result, he says vaccination clinics at the WFCU Centre in Windsor will be closed two days a week because there isn't enough supply to keep it open.
Dilkens says as a nation, we're falling behind.
"When we talk about priority communities, even in our own region by postal code, looking at hot spots, target populations, in our region we have to also consider the farm workers as well, the temporary foreign workers," he says. "The federal government really needs to ramp up the vaccine supply delivery in the next few days and weeks, not the next few months."
Inside the COVID-19 vaccination site at the WFCU Centre in Windsor, March 3, 2021 (Photo by AM800's Rob Hindi)
Dilkens believes if the federal government is planning their shipments to the province and there is a delay, they should have the goal of making this as friction free as possible.
"There are 34 health units in Ontario, ask the province of Ontario for which distribution should go to each health unit every week and just send it directly to the health unit," he says. "Let's avoid the shipping delay to the province, that they have to use another day to get it out again, ship it directly to the health units."
Dilkens is also he's troubled by what's going on when they send messages to the federal government, only to hear more vaccines are coming, just hang in there.
He point out that you can't just take a building and turn it into a vaccination centre, it takes some effort to put all the pieces in place and put all the staffing in place.
"When we do get dumped with 30 or 40 or 50,000 doses, we have to be ready for that and be able to plan for that. This is really flying by the seat of our pants, I don't like it and I don't think the community should like it either," he says. "We have to be better, we should strive to be better as a country and the prime minister needs to help get more vaccinations down in Windsor-Essex."
As of Wednesday, the Windsor-Essex County Health Unit says that 121,897 doses of the vaccine have been administered to people across the region.
More than 8.5-million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered across Canada since the inoculation efforts began.
The number of fully vaccinated Canadians continues to creep forward, with officials reporting 829, 067 people or 2.2 per cent of the population.
COVID-19 vaccine shortages are forcing two health networks in Toronto to either close or limit their immunization clinics.
Scarborough Health Network's Centennial College and Centenary hospital clinics are closed Wednesday.
The University Health Network has paused registration for appointments for anyone over 18 in hot spot areas who qualified for a shot based on their postal code.