Walk-ins for 2nd COVID vaccine halted; more appointments open

The Southern Nevada Health District is doing away with walk-ins for second doses of the COVID-19 vaccine and instead opening up more appointments at Cashman Center.

Greg Cassell, the district’s incident commander for the incident management team, said that starting Tuesday, 1,000 second-dose appointments a day will be available at the Cashman Center in addition to the 3,000 daily appointments at the Las Vegas Convention Center. The site will also continue to administer first doses.

People can begin making the second dose appointments for the Cashman Center online Friday night. The appointments are only for people who received their first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on or before Jan. 21, or people who received the first dose of the Moderna vaccine on or before Jan. 15.

“If you are not in that range, please do not make an appointment, do not take an appointment away from somebody else who needs to get in and get their shot during this tight time frame,” Cassell said.

Walk-ins, which began last week at the Las Vegas Convention Center for people who were unable to make a second-dose appointment, will no longer be available. Cassell told reporters Friday that enough appointments will be open for the 10,000 people who need the second dose and have not been contacted by the health district.

The 1,000 daily appointments at the Cashman Center will be available Tuesday to Saturday, he said.

“We will continue to add capacity in the weeks to come,” he said.

Long waits

Second-dose appointments are only available to those who got their first doses at these sites or events: the health district offices on Decatur Boulevard, Cashman Center, Western High School, Jerome Mack Middle School and vaccination clinics hosted by Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, Henderson and Touro University.

People with appointments should still expect wait times of an hour to an hour and 15 minutes, Cassell said. There will be separate lines for people with disabilities at both sites, so that they do not have to stand or walk as far as others.

“There’s going to be some waits, but that’s why we’re doing away with the walk-ins, because that’s just too long for somebody to wait,” he said.

On Friday, people at the Las Vegas Convention Center seeking a walk-in shot faced wait times of up to four hours. Long lines had formed this week because of technical difficulties with computers at the convention center, and a day with new staff from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who needed to be trained, Cassell said.

“It just bogged down the system; it was unintentional but unavoidable,” he said.

Cashman Center, 850 N. Las Vegas Blvd., is open Tuesday through Saturday. The vaccination site at the Las Vegas Convention Center, 3150 Paradise Road, is open on the same days and is located in the C-1 area of the facility’s Central Hall.

Second-dose appointments, when available, can be scheduled at covid.southernnevadahealthdistrict.org/vaccine/second-dose.

People with questions or who need assistance making appointments can call the health district at 702-759-1900. The line is staffed from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday.

Contact Katelyn Newberg at knewberg@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0240. Follow @k_newberg on Twitter. Review-Journal staff writer Mya Constantino contributed to this report.