{"id":28918,"date":"2021-03-12T00:05:11","date_gmt":"2021-03-12T05:05:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=28918"},"modified":"2021-03-18T22:08:30","modified_gmt":"2021-03-19T02:08:30","slug":"vaccinations-back-on-track-after-midweek-snag-left-seniors-in-the-cold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/vaccinations-back-on-track-after-midweek-snag-left-seniors-in-the-cold\/","title":{"rendered":"Vaccinations back on track after midweek snag left seniors in the cold"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Jessie Paquette dressed extra warmly on Friday morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Donning two pairs of jeans, a toque, and wrapping a heavy scarf around her neck, the 90-year-old Aurora resident wasn\u2019t taking any chances on her way to Newmarket\u2019s Ray Twinney Complex to receive her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She saw the pictures on her iPad the previous day, images of seniors standing in line outside the Complex in the blistering cold waiting for their turn. But, in her mind, the pros outweighed the cons and she was determined to get in line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was not alone. Nor was she alone in having questions, questions which staff from Southlake Regional Health Centre and the Town of Newmarket worked to rectify.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a statement issued on Thursday, Southlake said it \u201capologized\u201d for the long line and said earlier in the day they experienced \u201csome system and process issues\u201d that resulted in the delays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following Southlake\u2019s statement, Newmarket Mayor John Taylor issued an apology of his own to those who were impacted by the snag.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe should never allow our seniors to wait like that in the cold with nowhere to sit,\u201d he said in a statement posted to social media. \u201cTo be honest, I was heartbroken to see it. We sent over 12 staff and in about a half hour we had a numbering system in place, everyone inside and in chairs. Southlake CEO Arden Krystal has explained to me that the COVAX booking system went down\/slowed down and created the backlog, amongst other issues. Having said that, a call for assistance should have been issued immediately and people should have been given information and moved inside. In fact, they should and will be inside from now on. I assure you there will be lessons learned.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These lessons learned were shared Friday with The Auroran by Dr. Gayle Seddon, Executive Lead on Vaccinations at Southlake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe team last night spent a lot of time looking at exactly what happened yesterday,\u201d she said. \u201cWe partnered with the Town of Newmarket and that is helping us ensure that people arrive ten minutes before their scheduled time. Sometimes people arrive an hour or so, maybe more, and believe that they should get into the clinic and that is really not what should happen with a mass vaccination clinic. Our partners with the Town of Newmarket meet people in their cars, confirm the time of their appointment, and then they also\u2026check to make sure they\u2019re coming into the Centre about 10 minutes before their appointment. Making sure that people get into the vaccination centre at their scheduled time is one of our big learnings from yesterday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe are very sorry for the experiences people had yesterday. What we want them to know is all of the feedback people gave us, we debriefed through all of that last evening and put plans in place to address the concerns people had. They gave us feedback, we listened, we put it into our system, into our plans last night and we addressed it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arriving just a few hours later, Ms. Paquette had a very different experience than her friends who were in line the day before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was very afraid there were going to be big lineups,\u201d says Ms. Paquette, who lives in the community with her daughter and son-in-law. \u201cBut we drove in, went inside, sat down and we were called. I got my shot and then we had to wait 15 minutes before we left and could come home. I was very impressed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since the start of the pandemic, Ms. Paquette has done what she could to help the cause. An avid knitter, she crafted mask extenders for frontline workers, including those at Southlake, which allowed face masks to be fixed behind the head rather than looped around the ears, a method that is far removed from comfortable after wearing the necessary coverings for hours at a time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She didn\u2019t hesitate to get the Polio vaccine when it was first developed, and she\u2019s not about to embrace vaccine hesitancy any time soon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think it is important that people realize that we have a pandemic and in order to get through it and get through it successfully we have to look back on what happened when they had the Polio vaccine and everybody went and got it,\u201d she says. \u201cI think people realize that they have to have to get the shot. If you haven\u2019t heard people talking about adverse reactions to it, why wouldn\u2019t you go out? All of my friends have gone and got it; it is there, it is being offered as a public service and they have organized it extremely well for people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI am not sure if I\u2019m looking forward to the second shot, but I am going to get it! My son-in-law is American and his wife, my daughter, is a Canadian and they have a son living in Texas who had their first baby and they can\u2019t even get down to see them. You have to look at the circumstances. We must do things in order to curtail it coming back and having another wave. I am looking forward to being able to get out \u2013 I am tired of being in the house!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As of Tuesday, March 9, Aurora has seen a total of 980 cases of COVID-19, 32 of which remain active. There have been 908 recoveries and 40 fatalities attributed to the virus. Of the active cases, 29 are attributed to close contact or local transmission and 3 to workplace cluster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


For more information on York Region\u2019s vaccination efforts, and to book your appointment when the time comes for your age group or personal circumstance, visit York.ca\/covid19.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Brock Weir<\/strong>
Editor
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter<\/em><\/p>\n\r\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jessie Paquette dressed extra warmly on Friday morning. Donning two pairs of jeans, a toque, and wrapping a heavy scarf around her neck, the 90-year-old Aurora resident wasn\u2019t taking any chances on her way to Newmarket\u2019s Ray Twinney Complex to receive her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. She saw the pictures on her iPad […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-7wq","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-18 08:20:00","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28918\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}