For two hours, Bep van Veen (63) and her husband from Haarlem stood in line on Saturday for a booster shot in Leiden. But when things didn’t work out, they left, Bep says, loading her walker into the car. “It was all the way there,” she points into the distance, past the end of the parking lot. After a few hours they came back to try again. With success: her husband has been boosted. She herself was unlucky: her second vaccination was given just under six months ago, it is a week away.
The conditions were strict, the GGD Hollands Midden warned this week already on the website: People over sixty can come and get a booster without an appointment, but only if they had had the second shot more than six months ago. Van Veen will now schedule an appointment online, she says. “I thought it was more important for my husband, a test showed that he had not produced any antibodies after the first two injections.”
Long queues stood in front of the door on Saturday morning at the injection locations in Gouda, Alphen aan den Rijn and Leiden. The GGD Hollands Midden is the first in the Netherlands to offer the booster shot without an appointment for people over sixty, because there are more vaccines and staff available than necessary to serve all people over eighty who come by. In this way, about 1,700 shots were taken on Friday, more than 2,100 on Saturday. Those are the last shots without an appointment for the time being: the GGD stops because of the dangerous traffic situations that arose offering the booster shot without an appointment.
Wim van Paridon (76) has just had his shot and has to wait another fifteen minutes before he can go on the road again. He lives in Leiden and came by first thing in the morning. “It was so busy that my wife and I just went home.” Then in the afternoon they went to look again and they could immediately walk on. “It’s so handy to be well protected,” he says. “It’s perfect that it is arranged this way, otherwise I would have had to wait a few more weeks.”
People from all over the region came by, it’s alive.
Walking fire
A matrix board warns in the afternoon that it is no longer possible to get a booster without an appointment. The fact that the GGD offered the injections spread like wildfire through the Netherlands. At half past five in the morning a woman from Friesland was already at the door, says location manager Laura Smolders. “People from all over the region came by, you can tell it’s alive.”
Jane and Pieter van Vliet (both 70) will leave for Portugal next week to spend the winter there for two months. When they heard that the injection site was so busy, they had already given up hope that they would succeed. “But a friend of ours warned us at one point that it was quieter and now it has worked,” says Jane. Pieter is happy with it: “This gives me a little more reassurance when we are on holiday later. We are already protected with two shots, but after six months that is less.”
Michiel Rap of the GGD Hollands Midden is satisfied with the course of the day. “I’m glad we were able to use the resources we have.” In the coming period, the GGD wants to provide tailor-made solutions and send a text message to people who have not yet made an appointment, but it is their turn.
Also read: What exactly does a booster do and do you have to keep adding it every time?
In any case, the people who were able to get the shot are very happy with it. Janneke Onderwater (65) got the booster for a sick friend of hers, for whom she is a caregiver. “I feel a little better protected when I go to her now.” She likes the free walk-in, “otherwise you have to wait a long time with the holidays coming up.”
Bep van Veen is also happy with the diligence of the GGD Hollands Midden. “De Jonge just screams and nothing happens. Promise much, give little. At least this GGD is smooth. Because with the increase in the number of infections, I thought it was getting scary.”
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