By David P. Ball
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Monday saw health workers set up their third day of pop-up vaccination clinics in the heart of the Downtown Eastside (DTES) neighbourhood, which has some of the worst COVID-19 case numbers in the city.

The neighbourhood's local health area currently has roughly four times the cases of COVID-19 per capita than the city's wealthier west side, the latest B.C. Centre for Disease Control data show.

After roughly a thousand voluntary doses were administered starting Friday, clinics on Saturday and again on Monday continued immunizing hundreds of residents of local single-resident occupancy hotels, supportive housing projects, and those who are homeless. The health authority hopes once those high-risk populations are complete, they will be able to then vaccinate anyone living in the DTES within weeks.

Dr. Patricia Daly, Vancouver Coastal Health chief medical health officer, was in the clinic at the Carnegie Centre administering doses herself, and said those who volunteered to get vaccinated expressed gratitude, surprise and excitement for the opportunity.

"We are going to continue over the next few days," Daly told The Pulse on CFRO. "As long as we have vaccine to vaccinate in this neighbourhood, we want to get as many people as possible.

"We're starting with those places where we've actually seen more cases and more transmission, but I want to reassure everybody in the neighbourhood that over the next weeks and months ahead, you will all be vaccinated," she added.

She said they were giving out an average of 1,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine every day, primarily targeted at homeless people and those living in single-resident occupancy hotels and supportive housing. But she assured renters and co-op residents that they, too, would soon have their turn as the neighbourhood's health vulnerabilities put it at the highest priority after seniors homes.