MONTREAL -- Continuing a trend of opening up bookings a little earlier than expected, Quebec's vaccine appointment portal is now accepting 25-to-29-year-olds for appointments.
They were scheduled to have access only on Wednesday, but their slot opened at about 4 p.m. on Tuesday.
The previous group, those from 30 to 35, were supposed to get access on Monday, but the portal opened to them on Sunday night instead.
The response was incredibly encouraging, provincial health minister Christian Dubé said on Tuesday: in the first 24 hours, a full half of Quebecers in their early 30s booked appointments.
Many have already gotten their doses, in fact, since a steady delivery of supply means wide availability right now.
The booking website, ClicSanté, currently shows that a majority of vaccination sites in Montreal, both pharmacies and mass vaccination sites, have open slots in the next week.
'THEY'RE FRUSTRATED'
Dubé said he feels youth in Quebec have been asked to make a lot of sacrifices in the pandemic and haven't been paid much attention, but from what he's seeing, they're likely going to jump at vaccines and bring the province to the benchmarks it needs to relax a lot of the rules.
"At the end of the day... I trust them, because I have a young person at home. He tells me that they're frustrated and they can't wait to see their friends," the minister said in the daily COVID-19 briefing.
"We kind of left them aside since the beginning," he said.
"They're the ones who had jobs at restaurants and part-time jobs. They're the ones who had to make sacrifices for the elderly because we asked them to cut their social contacts with our grandparents, but... we didn't give them much."
He said that now, this group is the "priority" and he's watching what happens this week very carefully.
