BALTIMORE — Within a week of its opening in late February, M&T Bank’s mass vaccination clinic had already proven that it could deliver shots in huge numbers in the race to tamp down the spread of COVID-19.
“We’re doing 2,000 today and then over the next week, we’ll be doing about 2,400 a day and then a week from today, we plan to go up to 4,000,” University of Maryland Medicine’s
Dr. Jason Marx told us at the time.
Starting from scratch, workers had taken just 18 days to transform the stadium’s club level into a clinic, which would require more than 400 nurses to administer shots to almost a quarter of a million shots over the next four months, including one of the first to enter its doors.
“As soon as I got the text from the Maryland Ready system, I jumped on the website and called the number just to see who got through first and I got lucky,” said Philip Anderson of Baltimore.
Ultimately, that same mass vaccination site that reached a peak of 6,000 shots per day and more than a thousand in a single hour has seen demand wane with only a dozen vaccines scheduled for its final day.
But in addition to saving lives and delivering shots, it also allowed people to begin returning to normal after a year of lockdowns, shut-ins and other restrictions.
“The first thing that comes to mind in our immediate family is the kids are not having the outdoor activities,”Ashish Kejriwal of Ellicott City told us in early March. “We can’t take them anywhere, and we as a family are not going on vacations. We haven’t been on any vacations so far so this summer, we are looking forward for those activities.”
