TRIADELPHIA — A building which once held a Michaels craft store will be the home of Ohio County’s COVID-19 vaccination clinics through the summer, if not longer.

The clinic is a joint effort between several health care providers in the area: Wheeling Hospital, Wheeling Health Right, the Wheeling-Ohio County Health Department, and the county Emergency Management Agency. The clinic, which is located adjacent to Bed, Bath and Beyond at the Highlands, will go into full operation Thursday. Doses of vaccine already were being doled out behind the press conference, held at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, catching up on doses due for higher education personnel.

The clinic will draw from the state’s online registry, available at http://vaccinate.wv.gov/, to schedule appointments for vaccines. Ohio County Health Administrator Howard Gamble said the order of when patients have their appointments scheduled is determined at the state level — all Ohio County asks for is for a list of names, and the state pulls from the registry and determines who gets them.

“If they have a way to factor in a health condition over another, that’s based on the Everbridge system, not what we do,” Gamble said, referring to the online registry’s provider. “We just go with name number one, and we’re looking to populate everybody into that clinic.”

Gamble said 400 doses will be administered Thursday, using seven of the clinic’s 10 lanes to get people in and out between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. The next few days will see patients get their second dose of vaccine, while new appointments will be put on hold until next week, when the county expects to get another approximately 300 doses.

The clinic, working at maximum capacity, is estimated to be able to be able to distribute 1,000 doses in a day.

The availability of vaccines continues to be limited by distribution from manufacturers to the states, which comes sporadically. Gamble said the bottleneck may be relieved when additional vaccines hit the market.

Kathie Brown, executive director of Health Right, said her group is honored to help their community with the clinic, alongside the testing it will continue to do at their own site.

“We have worked tirelessly with Wheeling Hospital and the Wheeling-Ohio County Health Department to offer widespread testing, and are now looking forward to doing the same through vaccinating our residents,” she said in a statement.

Douglass Harrison, CEO of Wheeling Hospital, called the establishment of the clinic “a great day” for the community, which demonstrated the power of cooperation between entities.

“The only way we’ll get through this pandemic is to vaccinate everybody,” he said. “I couldn’t be prouder today to be a West Virginian. This is the pioneering spirit of what we can do in West Virginia when we work together. I am very, very proud to be working side-by-side with these folks representing our community today, as we start to vaccinate our population and get back to some level of normalcy.”

The former Michaels building was lent to the combined healthcare providers through the Ohio County Development Authority and the Ohio County Commission. Gamble said no resources traded hands in exchange for the building, which was chosen for its availability of parking, as well as other features that made it ideal for this purpose.

“It has a lot of parking, it’s flat, handicap-accessible, and it has other perks as a location,” he said. “The entrance, you don’t have to touch handles. It had a lot of benefits as a location.

“Some of the other locations across the county are either being utilized or won’t work as a large, community vaccine center,” he added. “For example, (WesBanco Arena) currently has ice, and to take that away you’d take away what’s currently going on down there. The gymnasiums are in use, in the schools, and we can’t use those for the long term. This was a great fit.

Gamble said the county giving the healthcare providers use of the building is its way of offering help to combat the pandemic.

“There isn’t an exchange of resources at this time, other than that they can come and salt, plow, turn lights on,” he said. “Their effort is here too, with the development (board) and the county. They know if we have a venue, it’s for one reason, and that’s to slow down the virus and eventually stop it.”