ODESSA, Texas — Ratliff stadium has gone from super busy to deserted in just a few weeks.
City officials and hospital workers who were helping have gone back to their day-to-day operations.
Now that this vaccination site is no more, MCH is looking for more locations where they can operate.
"We don't really have the capacity anymore to do that large model and so this is the next best thing in our opinion. That's not to say that we reevaluate after we've done this and we do a tent in our parking lot. I don't know what that's going to look like. We're really just trying to think out of the box to cover as many people as we can," Christin Timmons, MCH chief nursing officer said.
Because MCH no longer has Ratliff at their disposal, they're cutting down the number of dose requests from the state too.
After all, they don't want to waste.
"We were getting upwards of 5300 and now we're getting about 2400," Timmons said.
Now on to what's next: Reaching more arms.
MCH is doing this by partnering with home health agencies like Encompass health, non-profits like Meals on Wheels and churches like Connection Christian to get together a list of people interested in the vaccine, with a run through with one of the churches starting today.
"To see what the flow might be, to work out any kinks and make sure our electronics all work," Timmons said.
So far, they've talked to all the home health agencies in the area saying, "We have vaccines, we'll bring them to you so that your nurses can give them, how many do you need, what's the interest, those types of things and so we're waiting on many of them to call back and we've also received many calls back saying we want and here's how many people we see on a home rotation basis," Timmons said.
Now, the busyness will be split by a few locations instead of all at one.
If you're looking to get vaccinated in Odessa, reach out to your church or home health agency for more details if they haven't contacted you already.
MCH will be releasing these new vaccination dates and times sometime in the next week or two.
And as always, the two urgent care locations at JBS and West County are still giving vaccines to walk-ins.