Toronto is preparing to launch a new hyper-local vaccination push in the city’s east end as it releases new data showing that individuals who have not yet received a booster dose are four times as likely to end up in hospital with COVID-19 as those who have.
The 10-day campaign, dubbed ‘Vax the East’ will be primarily focused on boosting vaccination rates in Flemingdon Park, Thorncliffe Park and throughout Scarborough.
The initiative will kick off this weekend with planned vaccination clinics at both the Ontario Science Centre and the Thorncliffe Park Community Hub running from 8 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. both days.
It will then continue next week with mobile vaccination teams slated to set up clinics at five to six Scarborough schools each day. Those clinics will be open to students, staff, parents and the wider community.
The city says that it will be informing residents in the east-end about its latest campaign through thousands of robocalls going out tomorrow but will also have its community ambassadors going door-to-door in neighbourhoods with lower vaccination rates.
“This is a local, targeted and effective effort to help people get vaccinated and in many cases it literally involves knocking on individual doors, floor by floor and building by building to convince people to go,” Mayor John Tory said during a briefing at city hall on Tuesday morning. “Just this past weekend I visited a Toronto Community Housing vaccination clinic and we saw this in action. We saw people there that had sheets with each of the names, of each of the people, in each of the apartments and they went and knocked on doors. We were able to work with those people and I saw the people coming down the elevators to get vaccinated. It was proof positive that this system is working.”
Toronto has increasingly been turning to hyper-local vaccine drives and clinics as it attempts to reach the roughly 10 per cent of its eligible population who have not yet rolled up their sleeves, as well the roughly 50 per cent who haven’t yet received a third dose.
Tory said that the efforts have been working, with third dose rates among those 50 and up increasing beyond the city-wide average in a number of neighbourhoods that were targeted in January.
Those include Mount Olive (from 37 per cent to 50 per cent), Black Creek (40 to 56 per cent), Caledonia Fairbank (42 to 56 per cent), Weston-Pelham Park (42 to 57 per cent) and Keelsdale-Eglinton West (42 to 56 per cent).
Meanwhile, new data released by the city on Tuesday shows the difference that booster shots are making amid the Omicron-fueled fifth wave of the pandemic.
The data shows that between Dec. 21 and Jan. 24 residents 60 and up with just two doses of vaccine were four times as likely to end up in hospital and seven times as likely to end up in the ICU, compared to those who have received booster shots. Unvaccinated residents were six times as likely to end up in hospital compared to those with three doses and 14 times as likely to require treatment in intensive care.
“We are putting our efforts where it is needed to provide that extra degree of assurance, or contact, or accessibility to make sure people can get vaccinated. We have made steady progress where it has been a little more challenging to do so,” Tory said of the city’s latest vaccine push on Tuesday. “It is important that we not comfort ourselves with the city-wide averages, which are excellent in the context of a global diverse city. But at the same time those overall numbers mask some disparities that exist that we are determined as a team to overcome and address.”
