SARASOTA – The Department of Health in Sarasota is moving their COVID-19 vaccine clinic to Sarasota Square Mall.
“As we look forward to the summer, and the summer heat, we had some concerns about staff all day long out in the heat as well as patrons so we were looking for a place where we could be long term, that handles large capacity and were very excited to be able to move into this space,” said Director of Sarasota Department of Health, Chuck Henry.
Henry says the new location will help serve all county residents
“So far all of our clinic have been on the north end, which is not very convenient for residents in North Port, or Englewood or Venice, so we were trying to find a central location that handles a large capacity that as the vaccine becomes available, we can operate five to seven days a week, continually putting people through and putting our numbers down, in terms of people waiting for vaccines,” said Henry.
Vaccines will be administered by appointment only.
“It offers a tremendous amount of parking, and easy access through public transportation because they are bus stops, in fact right outside the entrance that people would enter for this vaccine operation,” said Henry.
Those with an appointment are asked to enter the mall through the light south of Beneva Road and the Sarasota Square Blvd intersection to avoid walking throughout the entire mall.
The new location will begin distributing second dose vaccinations as early as Thursday morning.
“Today was our fifth clinic sending out for appointment s for tomorrow, overall the system has been working really good, we did have a bump in the process this morning where approx. 170 of the second dose vaccines got a wrong message, our team is reaching out to them personally to fix that so they get in here tomorrow for their second dose vaccination, but overall the system has been working quite well,” said Sarasota County Emergency Services Director, Rich Collins.
Collins says as of Wednesday morning over 95,000 people have registered for vaccine appointments. He says the county is now working on an account number system
“That’ll be on each, account and that account will be one or two individuals, depending on how the account was set up so each account will have a unique number, the team is finalizing that process so the big thing we’re working on is scripts so that each morning as new registrations come in they get added to that list,” said Collins.
As a reminder – Individuals who receive notifications have two hours to confirm or decline their appointment.
If an individual declines, they do not lose their place in the queue and will be contacted for the next available clinic.
To schedule and get updates on vaccine appointments, you can visit Sarasota County DOH website.
