California widens vaccine eligibility as ‘fourth wave’ worries mount
SACRAMENTO — California will open COVID-19 vaccine eligibility to millions more residents this week amid some worrisome news, as health officials warn about a potential fourth wave of infections and as Sacramento County wrestles with a small coronavirus uptick caused in part by the return of high school sports.
Starting Thursday, any Californian 50 or older becomes eligible for the vaccine, a step that opens the door to more than 200,000 residents of Sacramento County. On April 15, state officials will green-light vaccines for the entire age 16-plus population in California, making roughly an additional 1 million residents eligible in the four-county Sacramento area.
The expanded eligibility, however, almost certainly means more Californians will struggle to land appointments, due to the ongoing shortage of doses — and the aggravating lack of advance notice to health officials about how many doses they can expect week to week. The state is getting about 2 million doses a week from the federal government.
Meanwhile, after three months of steadily dropping COVID-19 cases rates, Sacramento County has experienced a minor uptick over the past week.
Dr. Olivia Kasirye, the county’s public health officer, said the increase since March 21 includes some infection clusters connected with youth sports, which relaunched in earnest earlier in March, including high school football.
The sports infections, however, have not prompted officials to consider prohibiting sports again.
“The outbreaks are small and easier to control,” Kasirye said. “You just have to quarantine.”
Case rates statewide in California continue to drop, but not as steeply as they were earlier this year.
Kasirye said she’s worried that, as the weather improves, more Sacramento residents will start mingling in groups before they are vaccinated.
“We’re hearing of people with mild symptoms who didn’t think anything of it. We have to remind parents to keep students home (if they are feeling under the weather),” she said.
“The concern of course is we are heading in the wrong direction in the case rate increase that will delay our ability to meet criteria for orange tier,” she said. “We are watching that carefully.”
Sacramento, El Dorado and Placer counties remain in the state’s “substantial-risk” red tier, which places limits on activities such as the number of diners allowed inside a restaurant. In those counties, new cases are popping up faster — 7.6 new cases for every 1,000 residents in Sacramento — than the statewide average of 4.6.
Yolo County, where the new-infection rate is closer to the state average, recently moved to the less restrictive orange tier.
Vaccines: A long way still to go
Even as supplies ramp up and more Californians get their shots, the numbers show that millions still haven’t been vaccinated in California.
Data from state health officials Tuesday show that about 224,000 Sacramento County residents are fully vaccinated, and 406,000 have had at least one dose of a vaccine.
That means that three months after the first doses arrived, about 14% of the county’s
1.5 million residents are fully vaccinated and 26% are at least partially vaccinated. (There is no set plan yet to offer vaccines to those who are under age 16. That’s roughly 20% of the population.)
Other area counties have higher vaccination rates. The California Department of Public Health said 19% of residents in Placer County and 18% in Yolo County are fully vaccinated, with about 31% in each of those counties at least partially vaccinated. In El Dorado County, 16% are fully vaccinated and 28% have had at least a first dose.
Statewide, 20% of the population has been fully vaccinated and another 17% is partially vaccinated.
Although the pool of eligible Californians will expand dramatically Thursday, swamping the available supply, experts such as Andrew Noymer said the weekly supply of 2 million doses in California isn’t exactly insignificant.
“If we can stick all 2 million of those (doses) in arms, 2 million a week ain’t bad,” said Noymer, an infectious disease expert at University of California, Irvine.
Variants and a spring COVID-19 resurgence?
At the same time, the emergence of COVID-19 variants is casting a cloud over an otherwise encouraging situation.
The state’s first case of the highly infectious Brazil variant was confirmed last week by public health officials in Santa Clara County. Officials say half of all new cases in San Diego County are probably the easily-spread United Kingdom variant.
The proliferation of variants make it all the more essential that Californians get vaccinated as quickly as possible, experts said.
“We need to seize the opportunity,” Noymer said.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration
on Monday lamented the widespread relaxation of COVID-19 protocols around the country. Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned of a new coronavirus surge and said she has a feeling of “impending doom.”
The announcement caught some health experts off guard, particularly in states like California where most of the numbers continue to head in the right direction.
“I’m cautiously optimistic,” Noymer said.
‘Managing expectations’ for vaccines
As eligibility loosens, public officials fret about a figurative stampede for vaccines that don’t exist yet. Surely adding to the frustration for many Californians: Most vaccination websites, such as the state’s MyTurn site, wouldn’t allow newly eligible residents to go through the signup process until Thursday, making it impossible for them to book appointments ahead of time.
Jenny Tan, public information officer for Yolo County, said “managing the expectations” gets harder as more residents become eligible.
“Just because you’re eligible, that doesn’t mean there’s a vaccine with your name on it,” she said.
Tan said the county is doling out vaccines carefully to make sure disadvantaged groups don’t get left behind. For instance, 29% of Yolo’s residents 65 and older still haven’t been vaccinated and the county is worried that its senior citizens are competing against younger, computer-savvy residents in the rush to sign up online for appointments.
The county’s public clinics have only 1,100 doses available this week, slightly more than last week, but she said most are being reserved for high-priority groups such as seniors and farmworkers. That will leave about 200 for the general public. The county won’t know until Thursday night what next week’s allotment will be.
El Dorado County officials are
facing a similar struggle — the prospect of a deluge of newly eligible residents seeking appointments.
“I’m sure a whole crop of people are going to start looking at our website,” county spokeswoman Carla Hass said.
Many are going to be disappointed. For now, the county’s website only takes appointments for public clinics through the end of April, and almost all of those slots are booked already, she said.
“We’ve done what we can — messaged out the fact that just because someone is now eligible, it doesn’t mean we have the vaccines available or the appointments,” she said.
Several counties and health-care providers in the capital region complain they have not gotten the number of doses they had hoped for and have been running clinics at less than capacity as a result.
Sacramento County has seen a moderate increase in doses in the last two weeks, but does not yet know who many doses will be available for next week, according to health officials.
Kasirye said the county does have a way of knowing what percentage of people who are trying to get a vaccine are forced to try repeatedly before they can land an appointment. She said, though, she fears that scenario will become more the case now that so many more people are eligible, whereas dosage shipments are not rising nearly that fast yet.
“That is a concern,” she said. “Our hope is we will have more vaccines and more places to offer it, so that people don’t get frustrated.”
As a sign of how everything is happening on the fly: Late last week the county was told it would get about 20,000 does for this week, so it set up clinics to dispense those. Then on Saturday, the state called to say it had thousands of extra doses of the Johnson & Johnson for Sacramento, bringing this week’s total up to a record high of nearly 30,000.
“That was a pleasant surprise on the weekend,” Kasirye said.