The state’s second-largest city will get a mass vaccination site by the middle of the month.
Worcester officials said during a press conference Thursday afternoon that a mass vaccination site will open at Worcester State University on Feb. 16 and will eventually ramp up to doing more than 2,000 vaccinations a day, if the available vaccine supply allows.
“We have waited a long time to get vaccinated. I have heard from people who are desperate to get the vaccine,” Mayor Joseph Petty said. “Everyone who wants the vaccine to get the vaccine, but we want to make sure seniors and those in our most vulnerable populations are served first.”
To start, the site expects to vaccinate about 1,000 people a day.
“We will start with 1,000 vaccinations per day over the first several weeks hopefully working our way up to 2,000 plus per day based on the supply of vaccines,” City Manager Edward Augustus Jr. said.
The Worcester State site, which will join a roster of five mass vaccination sites already operating in Boston, Foxborough, Danvers and Springfield, will be open Tuesday through Saturday and will operate between 9 a.m. and 5:30 p.m., city officials said.
“Having this right here in the middle of the city of Worcester, middle of in the middle of central Massachusetts, and a great convenience and a great relief to our seniors and their families who have been anxious about getting the vaccine,” Augustus said.
Worcester’s city manager said the city’s case numbers have been improving and this new site will help pull the city out of the pandemic. Still, he’s urging people to not let their guard down especially with the upcoming Super Bowl.
“So, we urge folks not to make the mistakes that clearly were made around Thanksgiving, around Christmas, around New Year’s that exacerbated the surge that we experienced,” he said. “We don’t want to see that repeated around the Super Bowl weekend.”
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