The City of Toronto laid out new details Wednesday explaining how people can book an appointment to get vaccinated against COVID-19 when an interim booking system for the city’s mass vaccination clinics goes online Friday.
While a provincewide booking portal is set to go live on March 15, the city is rolling out access to a version of the portal three days earlier on March 12 so that it can begin vaccinations on March 17.
The portal was designed based on input garnered from a mass vaccination pilot project run by the city for two days in January.
Fire Chief Matthew Pegg, who also heads the city’s Office of Emergency Management, said the key takeaway from that experience was that a city as large as Toronto required a centralized booking system. He added that he has had a chance to preview it and that it is "fantastic" and "intuitive."
“I can tell you, it looks fantastic,” Pegg told reporters at a city briefing Wednesday. “I'm really excited about the functionality. It appears to me to be very intuitive, and a very seamless means of moving through the process. And based on what I've seen, I'm confident that it's going to meet our needs.”
Starting Friday, Toronto residents born in 1941 or earlier will be able to book a vaccination appointment at one of three mass vaccination sites in the city: The Metro Toronto Convention Center, Scarborough Town Centre and the Toronto Congress Centre.
Eligible residents will be able to access the booking system by going to the city’s website (toronto.ca/COVID-19) and clicking on a registration button that will be featured prominently.
They will then have to enter the information from their photo health card, along with their date of birth, postal code, and an email or cell phone number. The system will then allow them to book a first and second appointment (roughly 110 days apart) at one of the locations.
Once the booking is complete, users will get a confirmation number and a QR code for their appointments.
People can help an older friend or relative to set up their appointment, but only one set of appointments can be booked per person.
A call centre to support the booking will not be available until Monday, when the portal goes live for the rest of the province and Pegg urged people not to flood 311 or Toronto Public Health with calls related to booking.
When the provincewide portal does go live on March 15, people will also be able to book appointments by phone.
The city says that at least 133,000 vaccination appointments will be available between March 17 and April 11, not counting appointments for second doses.
Pegg said teams will be evaluating the user experience and will make any adjustments as needed.
“I can tell you that we have teams, we have a team of people right now working on making sure and doing everything we can do to make this as seamless as streamlined and as clear a process as possible,” he said.
Pegg said people can expect to spend around 30 minutes at a vaccination clinic from arrival to departure. People who show up without appointments will not be vaccinated, the city said.
Anyone who has an appointment to get vaccinated through a hospital is being asked to cancel that appointment if they schedule one through the booking portal which launches on Friday.
The provincial government has faced criticism for its vaccine rollout plan, which opposition critics have described as “sloppy” and “confusing.”
While it was initially thought that there might be a central provincial system for rolling out vaccinations, the province charged each of Ontario’s 34 public health units with crafting their own plans for getting doses into arms.
While hospitals across the city have started vaccinating some older people and special population groups, the launch of the mass vaccination sites next week will mark a major scale-up in Toronto’s efforts to vaccinate its population.
The city plans to eventually bring six more mass vaccination sites online as vaccine supplies increase, along with hundreds of smaller vaccination sites. Once that happens, Pegg said, Toronto will have the capacity to administer 500,000 doses per month.
The vaccination sites could also begin operating 24 hours if there is sufficient supply.
The new details about Toronto’s mass vaccination program come the same day the city announced a grim milestone; that it has now seen more than 100,000 cases of COVID-19 and that 2,699 people have died from the virus.
Health officials are urging people to continue practicing public health guidelines such as distancing, masking, and avoiding nonessential gatherings while most people remain unvaccinated.
