Ballarat Health Services has encouraged every eligible resident to come forward and receive their vaccine in the wake of Thursday's announcement of a week-long lockdown.
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While the Grampians region ticked over 20,000 vaccinations across public clinics in Ballarat, Horsham and Ararat on Thursday and Wednesday marked Ballarat's single biggest day of vaccinations, doling out 693, Ballarat's vaccination facilities are not even close to capacity.
BHS chief executive Dale Fraser said the current uptake was not enough and urged all those eligible to receive their jabs.
"It's still not enough, however, the clinic has far more capacity than that and I would urge everybody who is eligible to to get vaccinated," he said.
"20,000 vaccinations is still not enough, however, and we certainly would encourage everybody to get vaccinated. This week's outbreak in Melbourne and the example we've had in Ballarat are prime examples of why vaccinations are important.
"The faster we get the vast bulk of Australians vaccinated and the vast bulk of Victorians vaccinated, it will give us added protection against the transmission of disease and the variants that are cropping up from various examples from around the world."
Mr Fraser said the BHS vaccination clinic had the potential to cater for 1200 people per day.
"The clinic has plans to expand the number of cubicles and has the potential to expand the number of hours but that is all conditional upon the demand. At the moment, we haven't seen that demand to the level that we would have hoped to have seen," he said.
"We think our peak capacity is around 1200 and our peak load so far has been about 690, that's the maximum we've had so there's still plenty of capacity.
"I'd love to have the situation when demand is actually being pushed to that 1200 and if that's the case, we'll continue to look at options to grow even further."
Meanwhile, testing facilities were close to capacity this morning with a UFS clinic booked out and a 4Cyte Pathology drive-through site drawing a queue of cars around the block.
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The UFS clinic on Errard Street North was booked out until Sunday as of Thursday morning while wait times were estimated to be up to 90 minutes at the 4Cyte drive-through site at the old Atlantic Hotel on the Midland Highway in Redan.
Mr Fraser said BHS would continue to liaise with testing clinics around their demand.
"We continue to liaise with the testing clinics, the UFS claims and the 4Cyte Pharmacy and Pathology clinic and we're working with them to look at the demand they have," he said.
"Should there be demand for an additional clinic to be set up, we would work with those organisations to look at the capacity and then if they didn't have further capacity, we would look at our own potential to set up as well."
Bookings for the UFS clinic can be made online or by calling 4311 1571 with times available between 8.30am and 5pm on weekdays and 9am to 1pm on weekends.
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