As state and federal officials expanded their eligibility for the vaccine this week, local Bay Area health officials are desperate for more doses to meet the demand of those who were already eligible.
Since Contra Costa County began allowing all residents over the age of 65 to sign up for vaccination schedules – according to new guidelines released by U.S. and California health authorities – it has received a thousand applications per hour, enough to meet weekly dose allocation within 12 hours. The website of Sutter Health, a health care provider that vaccinates people in several counties, collapsed on Thursday at the high demand for vaccination investigations. To make matters worse, a second-dose federal vaccine depot that was considered for early supply was actually depleted, throwing “chaos” into an already rocky launch, in the words of a Santa Clara County official.
Contra Costa County has used half of the vaccine doses allocated so far, but it is not for lack of trials. Approximately 36,000 photos have been taken, and the other 36,000 are already accounted for with bookings scheduled for the next few days and weeks. Another 33,000 are expected to arrive soon.
“The county is not just settling on those other 36,000 doses,” COVID-19 chief of operations Dr. Ori Tzvieli told a news conference Friday morning. “We are rapidly stepping up our efforts to vaccinate as many people as possible. We want to take fire in our arms. … But the mitigation step is really how much vaccine we get for ourselves. ”
By the end of next week, the county hopes to manage 3,600 photos a day and increase that capacity to 5,800 a day by next month. In Santa Clara County, officials are increasing the number of vaccinations until the first phase of beneficiaries, from about 3,000 administered on Monday to 6,000 expected to be administered on Friday.
Dr. Jennifer Tong, an associate medical officer at Valley Medical Center, warned that it was just a small piece of necessity.
“The biggest constraint we face now is the availability of the vaccine,” she said.
So far, the county has administered 32,352 first doses and 6,594 secondary doses out of a total of 170,000 allocated. Two mass vaccination sites at the county fair in downtown San Jose and in a complex on Berger Drive in northern San Jose will soon be accompanied by a high-capacity site in Mountain View. An offer by the San Francisco 49ers to use Levi’s Stadium as another such site is still being verified by the county.
If there were more doses coming to Contra Costa County each week, Tzvieli would reassess the need for a mass vaccination site. But with the limited amount available, the 20 smaller sites in the county are proving more effective, he said. They will open in the next two weeks in Richmond and Antioch.
“It’s about supply,” Tzvieli said. “If I had an extra 20,000 doses, I’d fix that in an instant, but I don’t have them right now.”
Santa Clara County Attorney James Williams said they are still struggling to figure out how much vaccination capacity there is in the county, largely because of the hospital systems that provide care for most patients in South Bay, Kaiser and the Medical Foundation. Palo Alto, I get the vaccine. doses directly from the state. Federal providers, such as CVS, Walgreens and VA, are also beyond their data coverage.
“We don’t have full visibility into what they’re doing,” Williams said.
Williams pointed out that the state’s extension of vaccine eligibility to residents 65 and older does nothing to increase the available vaccine supply, which is why the county has set its own age limit of 75. At least 300,000 Santa Clara County residents are at least 65 years old.
“The reality is that we don’t have that much of a vaccine to deliver,” he said. “We see that demand exceeds supply and exceeds basic capacity for things like scheduling.”
Contra Costa County officials said they hope to vaccinate all 77,000 residents over the age of 75 “in the coming weeks,” but in the meantime have opened appointments for anyone 65 and older. For now, however, most photos on a given day are still greeted by health workers and those over the age of 75.
Williams also said officials were disappointed by Friday’s revelation that there was no alleged stockpile of secondary doses.
“I found out this morning that there is no such stock,” he said. “This undermines expectations about vaccine administration.”
He hopes that the promise of a truly nationally coordinated launch of the vaccine, promised by the new Biden administration, will reverse what he calls an abdication from the Trump administration, which he said he has dedicated resources to an unnecessary attempt to overthrow his election. Biden in the face of a pandemic. whose death toll is close to 400,000 in the United States.
“That really distracted the federal government’s energy from the first and most important job, which is to protect and care for everyone in the United States,” Williams said.
But the new administration will face a challenge, once a generation, to inoculate hundreds of millions of Americans in the coming months with vaccines that are difficult to administer. Even beyond the extreme storage and transport requirements, healthcare professionals need to be trained on how to handle the photo, then additional staff is needed to monitor recipients for the next 15 minutes in case of allergic reactions. All this must be done in a safe, socially distant way.
“To end this,” Tzvieli said, “all of this is being built as we face the biggest increase in the pandemic, which is already running out of limited resources.”