COVID-19 booster shots moved up for some
Southwestern Public Health announced Thursday, May 13, that some high-risk health-care, long-term care and retirement home workers and emergency medical first responders would be eligible to receive their second COVID-19 vaccine booster shot sooner than originally expected.
Starting Friday, those at a heightened risk of being infected by COVID-19 could seek their booster shots sooner than four months after their first immunization because of an increased and steady supply of vaccine to Ontario, the health unit stated.
Those eligible are “strictly restricted” to the following:
- All hospital and acute care staff in frontline roles with COVID-19 patients and/or with a highest-risk of exposure to COVID-19, including nurses and personal support workers and those performing aerosol-generating procedures
- Critical care units
- Emergency departments and urgent care departments
- COVID-19 medical units
- Code blue teams, rapid response teams
- General internal medicine and other specialties involved in the direct care of COVID-19 positive patients
- All patient-facing healthcare workers involved in the COVID-19 response
- COVID-19 specimen collection centres (e.g. Assessment Centres, community COVID-19 testing locations)
- Teams supporting outbreak response (e.g. Infection Prevention and Control teams supporting outbreak management, inspectors in the patient environment, redeployed healthcare workers supporting outbreaks or staffing crisis in congregate living settings)
- COVID-19 vaccine clinics and mobile immunization teams
- Mobile testing teams
- COVID-19 isolation centres
- COVID-19 laboratory services
- Current members of Ontario’s Emergency Medical Assistance team who may be deployed at any time to support an emergency response
- Medical First Responders
- ORNGE air ambulance
- Paramedics
- Firefighters providing medical first response as part of their regular duties
- Police and special constables providing medical first response as part of their regular duties
- Community healthcare workers serving specialized populations
- Needle exchange/syringe programs and supervised consumption and treatment services
- Indigenous health care service providers such as Aboriginal Health Access Centres, Indigenous Community Health Centres, Indigenous Interprofessional Primary Care Teams, and Indigenous Nurse Practitioner-Led Clinics
- Long-Term Care and Retirement Home workers, including nurses, personal support workers, and essential caregivers
- Individuals working in Community Health Centres serving disproportionally affected communities and/or communities experiencing the highest burden of health, social, and economic impacts from COVID-19
- Critical healthcare workers in remote and hard-to-access communities (e.g. sole practitioners)
- Home and community care healthcare workers, including nurses and personal support workers caring for recipients of chronic homecare and seniors in congregate living facilities or providing hands-on care to COVID-19 patients in the community
Those eligible will be provided instructions from their workplace or care setting for how to re-schedule their second dose appointment.