Fairgrounds to open as COVID vaccination site
A public vaccination clinic will open at the Kern County Fairgrounds next week and will ramp up efforts in the coming weeks to eventually vaccinate 5,000 people a day, according to the county’s top public health official.
The venue is set to open Jan. 20 for those in qualifying tiers, Public Health Director Matt Constantine said Wednesday. Appointments will be required and can be made on the county’s public health website.
The first few days will be a soft launch for certain organizations in the qualifying tiers as a way to get the operation going and work out any kinks. The general public
will likely not be able to get an appointment at the site until the following week, Constantine said.
Initially, the site will be able to inoculate 200 to 300 but plans are to scale up to 5,000 a day. It will start off as a walk-up center but eventually a large drivethrough operation will be added.
“The intent of that site is really to be set up to handle larger groups of people,” Constantine said.
The site will operate 12 hours a day, seven days a week.
There are dozens of other vaccine providers throughout the county that are currently offering the injection. Some sites require an appointment. They can be found on a map on the county’s public health website.
A state testing site is also currently operating at the fairgrounds. There is also room available if the county needs to activate its alternate care site to handle excess hospital patients if the hospitals become too overwhelmed, Constantine said.
California officials have been criticized by some for a slow rollout of the vaccine. A letter from some Senate Republicans to Gov. Gavin Newsom Wednesday noted the state has received 2.4 million doses of vaccine so far but has administered less than a quarter of those.
State Senate Republican Leader Shannon Grove of Bakersfield said in a statement: “With the vaccine serving as a ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ for 40 million Californians, solving these problems must be an absolute priority for the governor’s administration. Health care workers, frontline employees, elderly and at-risk citizens, and the residents of the Golden State deserve nothing less than immediate action.”
Constantine said rolling out the vaccine locally has been complicated.
“It’s not like you’re just giving a shot; there’s a lot going on behind the scenes,” he said.
Providers must be approved, he said, and many are smaller locations that cannot accommodate large groups. Also, only certain groups can receive the vaccine and, in some cases, the county has had to do outreach to companies and offices notifying them their employees can get vaccinated. Even then, many companies cannot just send all their employees out to get a vaccine because they have clients or patients to be seen.
It was not known Wednesday how many doses of the vaccine have been allocated to Kern County or how many have been administered, but the state said that information will soon be available.