AUGUSTA, Maine — The shouts of the crowd, the bounce of balls, and the squeak of sneakers are not being heard this week at the Augusta Civic Center. The annual high school basketball tournament, one of Maine’s cherished winter traditions, has been canceled by COVID.
On Wednesday, the City of Augusta opened a mass COVID-19 vaccination site at the city's Civic Center in partnership with MaineGeneral and the State. According to a release, nearly 200 people received their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine at the clinic Wednesday.
“This is a great day and an important first step in returning life in our community to normal,” Augusta Mayor David Rollins said.
Medical professionals from MaineGeneral Medical Center will run the day-to-day operations and administer the vaccines.
“This location greatly expands our ability to provide more vaccine to community members,” MaineGeneral Health President & CEO Chuck Hays said in a release. “The City of Augusta has been incredibly helpful in transforming this facility into a vaccination clinic. Along with State support on the ground, the City has supported our needs. This includes everything from transforming the physical layout, providing equipment to set up each area, helping us ensure the necessary technology is able to be installed and providing key logistical support in every way here at the Augusta Civic Center.”
Hays said MaineGeneral worked "for weeks" with the State to find the appropriate place to hold large vaccine clinics in the region.
“As we receive larger amounts of vaccine, we’ll be able to meet the community’s needs at the Civic Center," Hays said.
MaineGeneral has already administered more than 5,000 vaccinations to staff and others in the 1A priority category. This Civic Center clinic is aimed, for now, at the large group of Maine people age 70 and older, and then will take others as they become eligible.
The hospital said the clinic has the space and available staff to vaccinate 1,000 people per day, but that would require much larger allocations of the vaccine. At the moment, they are using the Pfizer vaccine. That requires super-cold freezers for proper storage, which the hospital has at the main campus, roughly a two-mile drive away. They say a team of pharmacists bring the vaccine from the freezer to the Civic Center, where it is prepared for actual use.
They won’t know until the end of this week how many doses will be available next week, so they could not predict how many people will be scheduled.
“We have thousands of people pre-registered, and they are time stamped so our registration team is able to call them in the order they pre-registered to so they can come in the next week,” Alex Sydnor. Maine General’s chief strategy officer said.
If eligible, you can pre-register for the COVID-19 vaccination clinic at the Augusta Civic Center online, 24/7, here or by calling, toll-free, Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 1-866-XOUT-C19 (1-866-968-8219).
More than 10,000 people have already pre-registered. Pre-registration is required through the website or phone number.
Do not pre-register if you are not currently eligible for the vaccine. City staff said if you do, the website will not save your information and you will need to pre-register again when your time to enroll is open.
"Currently, demand for vaccine greatly outpaces supply. It may take weeks for a person to get a call from MaineGeneral to schedule their vaccination," the City of Augusta wrote in a statement.
The site will have both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines on hand.
When registering, the patient will be scheduled for the first and second dose. You will not be asked for social security or credit card information.
There are no out-of-pocket costs. Patients will need to present their state ID and proof of residency, such as an electric bill, upon arrival at the site.
Staff is asking people not to arrive more than 10 minutes prior to their appointment. The waiting line and monitoring locations are set up to follow CDC guidance of social distancing. An appointment typically takes about 45 minutes.
The Augusta Civic Center site is Maine's fourth COVID-19 mass vaccination site.
Currently, Northern Light Health is hosting a site at the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor, and MaineHealth is hosting a site at the former Scarborough Downs. MaineHealth plans to open the state's third mass site in Sanford in February.
Since February 1, MaineGeneral has already provided doses to more than 1,380 people in the community, and more than 5,600 in total since the vaccine became available in Maine.
The clinic is right off of I-95, which runs through the state from the New Hampshire border in Kittery to the Canadian border in Houlton.
“Large community vaccination clinics like this one at the Augusta Civic Center are a key part of our effort to vaccinate as many Maine people as quickly, efficiently, and equitably as possible,” Maine Department of Health and Human Services Commissioner Jeanne Lambrew said in a statement. “We thank MaineGeneral and the City of Augusta for their collaboration on this site, the Maine Legislature for their support of this location, and all those on the front lines of administering vaccines for their work to protect the health of Maine people.”