KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Preparations are underway for Kansas City's first mega COVID-19 vaccination event at Arrowhead Stadium.
The event, scheduled for Friday and Saturday, will vaccinate 8,000 people in total. Four-thousand doses of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine will be administered each day. The event was originally expected to administer between 6,000 and 7,000 doses.
Members of the Missouri National Guard spent Thursday setting up traffic cones to direct cars through the drive-thru style clinic.
The two-day clinic is appointment-only. Organizers say all 8,000 slots are currently filled. The Jackson County Health Department will work to make sure any leftover doses do not go to waste.
With any event of this scale, traffic backups can be cause for concern.
Col. Russell Kohl, medical liaison for the Missouri National Guard, said having a lot of mass vaccine clinics under his belt has helped him learn traffic congestion isn't so much of a concern with scheduled events such as this one.
"Come at your scheduled time, this is not the event where you should show up a half hour early or show up fashionably late, if you have an appointment at 1 o'clock, we would like to see you here at 1 o'clock," Kohl said.
Cars will pull into gate 3 at the stadium off Blue Ridge Cutoff. They'll be directed into two lanes and will first pull through an area to verify their scheduled appointment. They'll then follow the lanes to receive the vaccine inside their car. After that, they'll pull forward to be observed for 15 minutes.
About 60 National Guard members will help run the event.
"We will be providing the logistical support, getting the 4,000 vehicles through here in an orderly fashion tomorrow, making sure all the paperwork is taken care of and that those health care providers can really focus on providing the health care," Kohl said.
Staff members from Truman Medical Center/University Health will administer vaccines.
Chief Medical Officer Dr. Mark Steele said he and his staff are excited to help get the population closer to herd immunity.
"Doing more and more, it's just — it's great. And when you're there, when you go to the vaccine clinics, everybody is very appreciative, they're very happy," Steele said. "It's really a very rewarding process and it'll be rewarding this weekend as well I'm sure."
Kohl said it can hard to estimate how long people will wait in their cars, but if traffic is flowing as organizers hope, people should expect to wait about an hour.
