“With how easily COVID-19 is spread, the health department wanted to make sure people weren’t in a confined area,” Nicholas said. “They wanted screening sites and the ability to move cars in a Y pattern, so you could move cars to one area to wait while other cars could move down the line.”
To follow necessary distancing measures and still serve as many people as possible, the venue had to be outdoors. Nicholas shared that nothing on this scale had needed to be organized before -- while concerts and festivals can have several thousand people in a weekend, the arrival and departure of cars is much more spread out than a drive-through vaccination site. As an added factor, one of the sites had recent construction taking up part of the lot. It didn’t show up on free imagery tools, and scheduling a drone pilot to map the site would have been nearly impossible on such short notice.
“We only had four days of actual planning,” Nicholas said. “You’d have to get the FAA permissions for a drone to fly over the site, then you’d have to get a crew that would be willing to do that in that amount of time and actually give us multiple angles and views. It would have been next to impossible.”
Complicating this process, people who receive the vaccine must undergo a required observation period for possible allergic reactions. While most people are observed for 15 minutes, those who have had previous reactions to vaccines or other potential health risks may need to be watched for 30 minutes to an hour. Directing cars from the entrance, to point of contact, to observation and then exit requires a lot of moving around to prevent traffic jams.