COUNTY REMAINS IN PURPLE TIER
UC San Diego to resume vaccinations at Petco, but doses may run out
San Diego County once again found itself outside the select group of California counties promoted to the less-restrictive red tier Tuesday.
Though its case rate fell once again, the number still has not hit the lows seen in the seven counties, including Napa, San Francisco and Santa Clara, that climbed up a rung in the state’s four-level reopening system. Those regions regain the ability for some businesses and organizations to resume indoor operations and for upper-grade schools to bring kids and teachers back to campuses.
San Diego’s modified case rate per 100,000 residents came in at 10.8, still over the limit of 7 that sets the lower bound for the red tier. The California Department of Public Health confirmed Tuesday that counties must hold their case rates low enough to qualify for a less-restrictive tier for two consecutive weeks before they can move up. So, even if San Diego’s case rate was 7 or less next week, the tier assignment would not change for at least one additional week.
Well, that’s the way the system works today, anyway.
In her biweekly COVID-19 report to the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, Dr. Wilma Wooten hinted that changes are in the offing for the state’s tier system.
“There may be news with modification of this coming out later this week,” Wooten said.
The tier system, after all, was introduced on Aug. 31, nearly three months before the first coronavirus vaccine doses were shipped to front-line health care workers in December. With California reporting that 9.3 million
doses have now been administered statewide, and nearly 1 million of them given in San Diego County, today’s pandemic reality is very different than it was when the current system of operating restrictions appeared.
Supply remains the main constraint in rapid vaccination. Nick Macchione, director of the county health and human services agency, told supervisors Tuesday that the local vaccination effort, estimated to be capable of delivering 33,000 vaccinations per day, on average, is currently only able to deliver about 14,000 doses per day. Most recently, delivery constraints around doses made by Moderna Inc. forced UC San Diego’s juggernaut super vaccination station near Petco Park to shut down.
UC San Diego Health will reopen the operation Wednesday and Thursday with no firm guarantees that the site will stay open beyond the next couple days.
Roughly 4,000 San Diegans will get their shots at the downtown site over the next two days, according to UCSD, with appointments going to those who’ve waited the longest for a second vaccine dose. Those people will receive a notification through MyChart, UCSD’s electronic health record system, according to a spokesperson.
About 120,000 people have gotten their shots at the mass immunization site since it opened in mid-January.
A sea change is under way in the way that local health departments and health care providers receive the doses they put in arms. On Monday, Blue Shield officially began taking over administration of the state’s incoming vaccine supply. The company said late last week that it will begin making week-ahead vaccine allocation decisions which prioritize 70 percent of doses for those age 65 and older, designating the remaining 30 percent for “the educational and childcare, emergency services and food and agriculture sectors.”
Those splits, Blue Shield said, pertain to first doses only with “second doses being sent to the provider who administered the first vaccination dose.”
On March 31, the company says it “will take full management responsibility for the statewide vaccine network and continue providing vaccine allocation recommendations to the state to assist in its allocation decisions.” Blue Shield’s contract with the state requires it to provide daily allocation reports to the California Department of Public Health, though no such document was immediately available for public review upon request Tuesday afternoon.
The state’s tier report, by comparison, was readily available and showed that San Diego County continues to languish in the purple tier not just due to the total number of new tests coming back positive but also because the total number of tests being performed per capita across the region are not as robust as is the case in other places that have recently made their way into the red tier.
San Luis Obispo County went red this week with an average of 12.6 confirmed cases per 100,000 residents while San Diego, with a score of 11.3 per 100,000, stayed purple.
The difference? San Luis Obispo is said to have performed 661 tests per 100,000 during the one-week measurement period from Feb. 14 through Feb. 20, earning a 45 percent reduction of its raw score, falling to 6.8, two tenths of a case less than the red tier limit of 7. San Diego, on the other hand, saw its case rate reduced only 4 percent because it performed 374 tests per 100,000, much closer to the statewide average of 346.
Other areas that likewise went red Tuesday also outstripped San Diego on the testing front including: Lassen, 625 per 100,000; Napa, 574; San Francisco, 677 and Santa Clara, 644.