Booking your COVID-19 vaccination will soon be at the tips of your fingers.
The province-wide online booking system is set to launch in early April.
We spoke to health minister Adrian Dix, who said online will serve as a platform for B.C.’s entire immunization program.
“So you’ll have a system where eventually we’ll all be able to access our own immunization information,” Dix said, “which is going to be important – let’s face it, we all know this – in the coming year, for people to be able to access that themselves in addition to having a paper copy of the immunization.”
He says that’s because, frequently, there may be cases where people will need to show that they’ve been immunized in the coming year.
“And, in any event, we need people to have access to their own information and that will all be available soon,” Dix added.
He says the current booking-by-phone system is also “going quite well.”
Looking ahead, Dix says before COVID-19 restrictions can be eased, we need to continue to follow provincial health orders, and just as importantly, get vaccines into the arms of British Columbians.
“We continue to be in respiratory illness season, and those measures continue to be critical,” Dix said. “Secondly, obviously, is immunization. We want to build towards community immunity. There are 4.3 million people eligible to get the vaccine in B.C. and just over 11 percent of those people have received the vaccine. But we have to reduce community transmission, now, in order to keep people safe, and then we’ll be able to take action on measures.”
He also touched on the threat of a third wave of COVID-19 hitting our province.
“What we’re seeing, everywhere, is case counts that are too high, is test positivity rates that are too high,” Dix said.
Even with recent numbers trending in the wrong direction, Dix offered a glimmer of hope for this year’s Grade 12 graduating students.
“We’re hopeful that there’ll be some possibility to do something, not the same as in the past, but something more special by June,” he said. “I think by then we’ll have immunized a significantly higher portion of people in the province, but we’re not there yet. But we are hoping that by June, that there will be some greater opportunity for students to be able to celebrate their graduations from high school.”
