(Davenport, IA) -- The former Davenport YMCA has a new purpose, as a COVID vaccine clinic.
Community Health Care has expanded their vaccine clinics into the former Davenport YMCA. They say the move was needed because they needed a bigger space to vaccinate more people. Tom Bowman, CEO at Community Health Care, told KWQC that, “Being across the street we can come over here and space out and get more people through the door. We have overflow rooms so we can do two pods at the same time if we get enough vaccine and so it really gives us a lot more opportunity to scale compared to the amount of doses that we receive."
The health system says the distribution process is running smoother with a bigger space. They aim to reach more under-served populations. “As a federally qualified health center we are really focused on hard to reach populations. So people living in transitional housing, congregate settings, homeless, those types of groups. We are trying to go out and be more mobile not just at this site but out mobile to those groups as well. We have a truck with a trailer on it that can keep the vaccines at the proper temperature and we can pull up to, for instance, a Day’s Inn where we are housing a lot of homeless individuals who might need to quarantine and we can go right to that site, go in, and give them the shot there in their rooms instead of them having to travel to a site like this,” says Bowman.
Community Health Care says they get about one hundred doses of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine per week. “We are trying to hold those doses for the hardest to reach. So if you are a homeless individual, we can give you one shot one time and you wouldn’t have to come back for the second. For those really hard to reach populations, we want to use the Johnson and Johnson as much as we can,” Bowman says.
You can sign up for a vaccine through Community Health Care on their website here.
(Photo by KWQC)