Los Angeles’ Dodger Stadium will be launched as a mass vaccination site starting Friday morning, City Mayor Eric Garcetti announced Thursday at a news conference.
The site, which the mayor called “the largest vaccination site in the country,” will have the capacity to vaccinate 12,000 people every day. An entire workforce has been deployed to administer the vaccines, according to Garcetti.
“This vaccine is safe, this vaccine is safe,” he said repeatedly, urging residents to receive the vaccine after they are eligible.
“It is your civic duty when it is your turn to receive that vaccine. It is an act of love for your fellow citizen, because it will save the life of someone or the life of many people and it is a step forward towards the reopening of our schools and economy ”.
Who can get the vaccine: In Los Angeles County, the vaccine is currently only available to health care workers and the elderly who live in nursing homes and skilled care facilities. While the county has about 1 million health workers, Garcetti said about half of them have not yet received the vaccine.
“The bottom line is that we don’t have enough vaccines,” Garcetti said.
He also said that some sites may reserve the allocation of vaccines to administer the second dose to their health care workers.
With the opening of Dodger Stadium and five additional vaccination sites in the county, Garcetti said he expects hundreds of thousands to be vaccinated each week.
What’s happening in Los Angeles County: The county reported a total of 975,299 cases of coronavirus and 13,234 deaths.
Hospitalizations in the county continue to overwhelm hospitals and health care workers, and there are currently 7,906 people being treated in the hospital with coronavirus – 21% of them in the intensive care unit.
Garcetti said that although there are early signs that hospitalizations in the county can stabilize, he is “not even close to being out of the woods.”