Traffic jams at Belleville COVID vaccination clinic on first day of expanded eligibility
Several streets south of downtown Belleville were gridlocked on Thursday by more than 150 vehicles at a time with passengers waiting to get COVID-19 vaccinations at Belle-Clair Fairgrounds.
National Guard troops were directing drivers to pass the fairgrounds entrance and form a loop around the neighborhood to the north. Traffic also was backed up on Illinois 159 and South Belt East.
“It’s totally, totally nuts out here today,” said Brian Wells, a Swansea village trustee who had brought his 85-year-old mother-in-law for her second shot.
Wells said he was surprised because he had been to St. Clair County’s clinic at the fairgrounds twice before — once for his mother-in-law’s first shot and once when she mistakenly scheduled her second shot too early — and the operation was running smoothly.
Wells said his mother-in-law got vaccinated about 11:45 a.m. on Thursday, more than two hours after her 9:31 a.m. appointment.
“Traffic (was) at a standstill,” Wells said.
One commenter on the Facebook page of the St. Clair County Emergency Management Agency reported waiting three hours to be vaccinated. That’s in contrast to 10- or 15-minute waits earlier in the month.
Another unhappy person on Thursday was Belleville Mayor Mark Eckert. He said he spent much of the morning on the phone with upset residents who couldn’t get out of their driveways and business owners whose customers couldn’t get into their parking lots.
“It’s a massive nightmare,” Eckert said.
“I’m aggravated because we worked so hard to get these businesses back open (after state COVID-19 restrictions were lifted), and now we have such a traffic mess. And they never communicated with us. Nobody from St. Clair County has talked to the police chief or me or my office.”
St. Clair County Health Department expanded eligibility for vaccinations on Thursday to Phase 1B, Part 2, adding ages 16 to 64 with high-risk health conditions.
That may have contributed to the congestion at Belle-Clair if people in that category showed up without appointments. But the main cause was that some with appointments were arriving three to four hours early, according to Herb Simmons, director of the Emergency Management Agency.
“That really slows the process down,” he said.
An estimated 50 vehicles were lined up outside the fairgrounds gate on Thursday morning before the clinic even opened.
Sam Bierman, the Health Department’s emergency readiness coordinator, said during a daily briefing Thursday that people showing up early for their appointments may be doing so out of fear that the county would run out of vaccine doses.
“You would not have gotten an appointment if we didn’t have a shot for you today,” she said.
St. Clair County has been administering 1,000 to 1,600 shots a day at the fairgrounds with few problems, Simmons said. He recommends people arrive only a few minutes early for appointments.
“The operative word here is ‘patience,’” he said. “There’s going to be vaccine for everybody who has an appointment. They just need to show up at the right time.”
Eckert said callers told him that the Emergency Management Agency sent out a CodeRED alert that gave people the false impression that they could show up at Belle-Clair on Thursday and get vaccinated, with or without appointments.
Simmons said that wasn’t true.
“Something went wrong,” Eckert said, “because today is a fiasco. There’s a tremendous (increase in the number of people), and nobody even bothered to tell us that there was going to be a traffic problem potentially. Even if they didn’t know it, why didn’t they call once it started getting backed up and ask for our help?”
Simmons said communication works both ways and that Belleville city officials could have reached out to the county and offered assistance.
Simmons said he drove around the neighborhood north of the fairgrounds and pointed out to residents that Thursday was the first day vaccinations at Belle-Clair have resulted in serious traffic problems since the clinic opened nearly a month ago.
“I told them, ‘We’re in a pandemic. We’ve been at this for 349 days. We’re doing the best we can,’” Simmons said.
St. Clair County Board Chairman Mark Kern apologized during the daily briefing to the neighborhoods that were affected by the traffic and called for “compassion” as the vaccination process continues in St. Clair County. He said if people show up when they’re scheduled, the process will go smoothly.
“We have a good plan that works,” he said. “We just need some consistency from those who are coming (to the clinic). Everyone is going to get a shot and it’s all going to be fine.”
This story was originally published February 25, 2021 at 3:12 PM.
