Dr. Greg Mercer is trying to control the swine flu he knows is running through the region.

The medical officer of health for Western Health is hoping to have most of the region's most vulnerable populations vaccinated against H1N1 influenza A by the end of next week.

So far at least 62 people have tested positive for the flu, in all centres of the region. With the flu everywhere and 70 per cent of the tests coming back positive for H1N1, they've stopped routine swabs for flu and are doing the tests in bad cases only.

"If it looks, tastes and smells like flu, it probably is," Mercer said.

Western Health announced the first week of its mass immunization campaign Tuesday morning.

The Corner Brook Bay of Islands area and Stephenville Bay St. George areas are tentatively scheduled to hold clinics Nov. 5 and 6.

"Our problem is we can't guarantee we're going ahead on Nov. 5 and 6 until we know what we're going to get," Mercer said. "It's not what you're told you're going to get, it's vaccine in hand. That's our challenge right now, vaccine in hand."

He said those clinics should each be able to handle about 2,000 people per day.

"This immunization was originally planned to roll out Nov. 15 or 16," he said. "We started, in actual fact, about three weeks earlier than we should have. We've only got it in limited supply because it's happening earlier. That's the challenge we have to work though in the next few weeks until the full national production is rolling out like it should."

This week Western Health received 3,000 doses of vaccine and a couple of more shipments are due before the clinics next week. Mercer's confident they'll have enough to cover the groups he's targetted for next week's clinics based on past seasonal flu vaccine campaigns.

He knows know how people with chronic medical conditions got the seasonal flu vaccine regularly in the last few years, how many children are in the region and how many pregnant women there are so it's not difficult to work through the numbers.

He said the vaccination isn't mandatory and it's up to the individual to show up on the day of the clinic.

Meanwhile Western Health is making appointments for children under 5 years old for Thursday and Friday of this week.

Mercer said the true mass immunization campaign begins the week of Nov. 9. The clinics will likely run from noon to 8 p.m. to give people working from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. a chance to attend.

He said a raw figure that came out of a mathematical model of the flu predicted about 75-80 deaths on the west coast through all the waves of H1N1. Those numbers don't account for the effects of vaccine and antivirals that are in use in the region now.