COVID: A Mass Vaccination Story
I got both my shots at the DeVos Place Convention Center. I’ve been there with the masses (packed like sardines, can you believe?!) for ArtPrize; been in various huge convention rooms for things like the Food, Beer and Wine Festival and the West Michigan Home and Garden Show and have seen performances there, seated shoulder to shoulder with others.
And now I can add I’ve been in this 162K square foot building, snaked in a long line, remaining 6ft away from anyone, with thousands, for my vaccinations.
It felt weird to be downtown and weirder to be flocking in the same doors with the exact people I’ve been actively avoiding.
Right when you come in you get a temperature check and shepherded into a line. I was pleasantly surprised at both my appointments that the line is nicely spaced out and never stops moving. There are plenty of volunteers to greet you and point you in the right direction as you snake around the big convention room floor.
I stopped exactly once, to fill out a piece of paper and check in at a computer. Then they move you to the hall of bays.
They had 7 halls (A-G) in the section I was moved to, though I saw a totally separate area of the convention center with at least 5 more halls. Each hall has 14 numbered bays. Each bay is a curtained off room, about 6ft x 6ft, with a nurse, 2 seats and a table of gear.
For both appointments I was in and out of my bay within 3 minutes. For shot #2 I watched as my nurse tipped a little flag to show outside of her bay. A runner came by and dumped more shots in her bin before lifting her flag back up. What a system, I’m telling you. So efficient in fact that at the end of March they had one if not two days of administering 12,000 vaccines A DAY there.
Clinic staff kicked off the Monday, March 29 vaccination effort at about 10 a.m. Roughly 600 health care workers and volunteers working at the clinic were planning to vaccinate about 1,000 people an hour over a 12-hour period, Brasser said.
Afterward you’re moved on to an optional (big!) waiting area with a timer so you can wait with medical personnel available in case of reactions. I saw no one who needed this, thankfully.
I thought I’d be emotional at this physical event tied so closely to us collectively getting out of this mess. And I was, sort of. But the process at DeVos Place kept me moving so fluidly there was never a down beat for my dam of All The Feelings to crack.
The extra reinforcement on that potential crack was sitting in my black plastic chair post shots, in a spaced out sea of so many others. I saw people who looked like me and people who looked nothing like me at all–all dealing with a sore arm and totally-worth-it side effects so we can get out of this together, and back to being strangers in this same exact space again; shoulder to shoulder, looking at art and drinking wine and watching performances and hopefully in those moments not thinking about much else.