Nick Holloway on Friday’s City Talk Edition of Talk Back

Nick Holloway, the Public Information Officer for the Missoula County COVID 19 Vaccination Team, was the featured guest on KGVO’s monthly City Talk segment of Talk Back.

Holloway provided a brief update on the mass vaccination clinics being held in Missoula.

“We've got some large mass vaccination clinics for the public,” said Holloway. “We are getting vaccine in and we're getting people vaccinated, but it we have to work our way through the Phase One B Tier One before we get to Tier Two and we need to get to a certain percentage and then we'll move to tier two and so on and so forth down the line.”

Holloway said he was pleased at how smoothly the mass vaccination clinics have gone so far.

“It's going really well,” he said. “The flow in the in the Adams Center where I mostly spend my time on Sundays is great. You walk in, you get checked in, you go through to the inside where they do a health screening questionnaire, and then they give you the vaccine and then you walk out all in a line with arrows on the floor and you sit down in a in a row and you wait for 15 minutes and when the whole process is going smoothly, which it has so far, only takes about 25 minutes.”

Holloway said the online vaccination registration portal is still going gangbusters.

“When you talk about the public excitement, I don't think that's died down at all,” he said. “We put out our online portal every time we have a clinic to schedule and we'll get that filled within five minutes, and that could be 650 people filling those spots within five minutes.”

Holloway closed with a reminder that the Office of Emergency Management is in charge of handling all the disasters in Missoula County.

“We have done a lot of different incidents,” he said. “Our expertise is in disaster management. so that means we use the incident command system and the structure that that provides to really attack any incident at all. We've done flooding, hurricanes, wildfires, severe weather, this is our third COVID assignment, and also urban avalanches. So we've done a lot, and we bring in the experts such as the health department and health care providers in this instance of the pandemic.”

Holloway was joined in the studio by City of Missoula Public Information Officer Ginny Merriam.