110K United Center Vaccination Appointments To Open For Seniors

CHICAGO — Starting Thursday morning, more than 100,000 appointments to receive COVID-19 vaccines at the United Center will become available to Illinois residents aged 65 and up.

Seniors will have more than three days of exclusive access to March appointments at a new federal mass vaccination site in the stadium parking lot.

About one in three seniors in the city has already received at least one dose of the virus, but city officials said about 250,000 seniors in Chicago and 500,000 in Cook County still needed to get vaccinated.

"In order for us to truly rise above this terrible pandemic, we must get our seniors vaccinated as fast and as humanely as possible — no shortcuts there, it's essential to us to be able to move forward," Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Tuesday at a news conference.

"Because we have seen that in Chicago, regardless of the underlying conditions, vaccinating older residents has the biggest impact in preventing COVID-19 related deaths, as more than 80 percent of the total number of COVID-related deaths in Chicago have been in residents age 60 and older," she said.

From 8:30 a.m. Thursday to 4 p.m. Sunday, appointments at the new site will only be available to those 65 and up.

To register online, go to zocdoc.com/vaccine for an opportunity to select an appointment time and enter a date of birth.

To register by phone, call 312-746-4835 to reach a multi-lingual call center available from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., Monday through Saturday, and 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sundays.

Residents were advised to use the website whenever possible. The call center has 200 staffers, but officials anticipate callers will encounter lengthy wait times.

"If you know somebody, if you have a neighbor, if you have an aunt, if you have someone who's over 65 who hasn't been vaccinated, please do that outreach right now and say, 'Can I help you make that appointment starting on Thursday?'" said Chicago Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Alison Arwady. "That be great."

The city's top doc said city officials had been working closely with aldermen, community groups and faith leaders to encourage every senior in the city to sign up. The site will be using Pfizer vaccines, so second doses will be scheduled three weeks after the initial jab.

Starting at 4 p.m. Sunday, the appointment system will open for everyone included in the state's Phase 1b+ priority group.

In addition to seniors and front-line essential workers, the group includes those under 64 with certain underlying medical conditions that put them at greater risk of complications from contracting the coronavirus.

The site is scheduled to be operational March 10.

Related: Chicago's United Center Will Become Mass Vaccination Site

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Plans for the 6,000-dose-a-day site were first announced last week by federal, state and local officials at a joint news conference.

Doses for the eight-week pilot program are being provided directly from the federal government, so they will not be taken from the city or the state's existing allotments. The site is being managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, with help from the Pentagon, as well as state, county and city officials.

Arwady said there are lots of plans for waitlists and re-posting appointment availability to ensure each of the 110,000 appointments available during the first three weeks of the site's operation gets taken.

"We'll start, we'll do three weeks of appointments — open that whole block up, right at the beginning," she said. "So that whole first three-week block opens up, first for seniors and then, if they don't fill, it would open more broadly than that. We'll do the three-week first dose, we'll do the three-week second dose, and then we'll be moving on from there. We're hopeful there will be even more vaccine by that point."

While vaccine supply is improving, Arwady said she did not expect to expand the city's version of Phase 1b to include those with underlying conditions or additional categories of workers, such as restaurant workers, for at least the next four weeks, if current projected dose allocations hold.

"Honestly, the way they've been coming in is about how I've expected them to come in. March is going to look a lot better than February did, related to vaccine, and I think April's going to look a lot better than March," she said. "So the numbers keep going up, but at this point we are not changing any of the eligibility criteria."

There are about 2 million seniors in Illinois, according to census estimates. The Illinois Department of Public Health reported Monday that about 335,000 – 17 percent of them — have been fully vaccinated.

The United Center parking lot site joins 15 other mass vaccination sites supported by state public health officials, according to the office of Gov. J.B. Pritzker. A statewide vaccine appointment locator also includes privately run vaccination sites at pharmacies and health care providers.

Chicago residents who are unable to secure transportation to and from their vaccination appointments may be able to receive free rides from a ride-hailing company.

When a resident books an appointment online, they will receive a confirmation email that will ask if they need transportation. If so, they have a chance to receive one of 20,000 ride credits, each worth $40, that can only be used for rides to and from the United Center arranged using the Uber app.

"Our goal is: get people signed up, have all sorts of opportunities for them to be transported to the site, in the event they don't have their own transportation. So we're going to be following up with folks." Lightfoot said. "We want to make sure we have full utilization of this rally important contribution that the federal government has brought to us, that's separate and apart from our normal vaccine allocation. We're one of few locations across the country, so we want to make sure we take full advantage of it."