Professor Mike Holmes, who coordinates York’s Covid vaccination drive, says the turnout from people at pop-up clinics held in York over the weekend has been inspirational

THE turnout this weekend from the people of York for their Covid vaccine has been inspirational.

It seems the more we ask of people, the more they put their trust in our healthcare and we’re truly grateful.

We decided to hold an extra pop-up clinic near Hull Road at Kimberlow Hill surgery last Saturday to see if we could encourage a few more young people from that area to have their vaccine. The result was fantastic.

People arrived – not quite in droves - but we had much higher numbers than expected with around 300 people vaccinated there in just three hours.

We even had to extend the clinic by an extra hour and some people had to be directed up to our Askham Bar vaccination centre as we couldn’t quite squeeze them in!

Our pop up clinic at Jorvik Gillygate surgery was also very busy for its eighth week running, with more than 100 people coming there for their vaccine on Saturday.

Thank you to all our teams who worked the weekend to cover these clinics. In total we’ve now run almost 30 pop up clinics, in additional to our main Askham Bar vaccination centre.

On bank holiday weekend we’re going further with a pop up clinic bang in the city centre at Parliament Street, just outside the Boots opticians.

So if you are planning on going into the city on Saturday, why not take the chance to get your vaccine. This will be a walk-in clinic opening at 9am til 1pm on Saturday.

The York community is so grateful to all those young people who have been coming forward over the last few weeks.

This is particularly important for those who are coming to the city to start their university and further education and we have been working hard with the colleges and universities to reach as many of students as possible.

Here in York we’ve now vaccinated more than 71% of 18-29 year olds with their first dose. Almost 2,000 16 and 17 year olds have now had their vaccine too.

As my colleague Dr Daniel Kimberling said a few weeks ago in this column, we really do have faith in our young people to do the right thing, and they have certainly shown that this week.

Behind the scenes Nimbuscare teams are making sure others in York are protected too – sex workers, asylum seekers, homeless people and other hard to reach groups of people.

We are prepared for people to arrive on our area from Afghanistan and will do what we can to support them too. Many are being given their vaccine as they arrive, but we will continue to work with these communities to provide vital healthcare.

Over 74.3 million doses have now been delivered in total

Nationally more than 125,000 16 and 17-year-olds got their jab over the last two weeks, bringing the total in that age group to more than 360,000 as we had already been vaccinating those who were classed as high risk earlier in the year.

From September, our focus will shift towards booster doses to run alongside the seasonal flu programme. As I’ve said previously, challenges are expected this flu season.

Our evergreen offer for COVID-19 vaccination will still be in place for anyone yet to receive a first dose for any reason, and to provide a second dose for all those who received first doses over the summer.