If you wandered into the Levi’s Stadium club spaces during a regular-season Niners game during non-pandemic conditions, you would likely find spots like the United Club and the Yahoo! Fantasy Football Lounge filled with football fans, enjoying the comforts and amenities of a premium seating space.
But this spring, those areas were used to serve a different purpose, to provide Covid vaccinations to residents of the south bay area that surrounds the Santa Clara, Calif.-based Levi’s Stadium.
Like at other venues, the wireless and display technologies inside the San Francisco 49ers’ home were more than capable of handling the needs of the relatively smaller crowd that is coming for shots.
“Our Wi-Fi network is always on and more than serves the needs of the vaccination site, which are much lower than when we have 70,000 fans, two NFL teams and 500 media and broadcast teams in the building,” said Jim Mercurio, 49ers Executive Vice President and Levi’s Stadium general manager.
Stadium signage helps with outreach
According to Mercurio, the site was able to make use of the 6,000 parking stalls in the lot adjacent to the stadium and the Great America theme park. Patients, he said, entered through security and receive a temperature check before being processed in the stadium. From there, they took an escalator up to the third-floor United Club for their shot and then up to the fourth-floor Yahoo Club for their 15-minute observation.
Through Feb. 23, the vaccination site at Levi’s Stadium had administered 13,732 vaccinations, Mercurio said, an average of more than 1,370 per day for each of the first 10 days of operation. Through the end of April, the site (which is still ongoing) had administered 205,000 vaccinations, according to the team.
Inside the stadium, the numerous video screens that are typically used for menu boards and game-day action were used for traffic flow and other vaccination information. And outside the stadium walls, on the Intel Gate A plaza video board that faces traffic that passes the stadium on Tasman Drive, the Niners were broadcasting information about the vaccination site. According to Mercurio, the messages were “rotating in four different languages — Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, and English — to help drive awareness and vaccinations among minority communities that often get vaccinated at a lower rate than other groups.”
Please read the rest of the profiles in our series about stadium vaccination sites, including in-depth looks at the setups at Hollywood Park in Los Angeles, Coors Field in Denver, Colo., and Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.
