Forum focuses on vaccine distribution

More than 3,000 questions submitted during meeting

SACRAMENTO » Sen. Mike Mcguire (D-healdsburg) held another Coronavirus Town Hall Thursday focusing on the state’s ongoing COVID-19 response and updating constituents and virtual attendees on the vaccine distribution throughout the state with an eye towards Northern California. A couple of thousand folks tuned in from across the state according to Mcguire who livestreamed the updates via Facebook and his website.

Over 3,000 questions were submitted prior to the forum and live viewers were invited to submit any questions during the Town Hall. “Longer term the outcome for vaccines looks incredibly promising,” Mcguire said in opening remarks adding that the federal government is asking the state in all regions and counties to prepare for four million vaccines per week. He added that officials have been meeting every other week ensuring that each county’s vaccination expansion plan will be submitted by the end of March.

The senator said that the state is looking into significant expansion of vaccination distributions starting in May and into June but he warned that the shorter term forecast “does not look as robust.” Mcguire said supplies coming from the federal government into the state for the next few weeks will remain fairly flat with approximately 5.4 million doses coming into the state by early April, not including vaccines going to pharmacies which have direct contracts and therefore receive a separate amount of vaccine allocation. Mcguire said the same is true for some federally qualified health centers and FEMA sites.

“About half of all Californians aged 65 and up have received at least one dose of the vaccine. The last 48 hour period in the Golden State was the highest for shots in arms since vaccine distribution started,” Mcguire said, explaining that just over 1 million doses of vaccines were allocated in California in this short period of time. “It took approximately two and a half months to get to 10 million doses of vaccines between December of 2020 and early March, but in the two week period this month that rate increased to 3 million,”

he said. “We’re greatly expanding the pace in which vaccines are getting to individuals. Really good news.”

However, Mcguire admitted that the vaccine rollout has been “less than smooth” on the federal and state side but promised positive changes are coming echoing similar statements made earlier this month during Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “state of the state” address.

Speaking at the Town Hall were Dr. Timothy Brewer, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and Geffen School of Medicine; and Lori Nezhura, deputy director of planning, preparedness and prevention from the State Office of Emergency Service.

“The good news is that we are way down from where we were at the peak,” said Brewer adding that numbers in European countries, like Spain and the United Kingdom, have continued to drop since the middle of January, whereas they are starting to go up in other countries like France and Italy where they are starting to go into another surge with about 20 to 25,000 cases a day.

Brewer said it is a similar situation here in the U.S where the average is about 50-60,000 cases of COVID-19 a day, but well down from the 240 to 250,000 cases per day we were seeing at the beginning of January. He called it, “A tremendous improvement. But we’ve been kind of flat for about the last week or two. We’re doing much better than we were two short months ago.”

Despite improving conditions, Brewer said Northern California is still lagging behind the rest of the state in terms of test positivity rates (Currently about 2 percent and 2.9 percent in some counties) “We still need to be aware that Coronavirus is in our communities and (need to keep) doing all those things like wearing our mask, washing our hands, maintaining our physical distancing which have been so important to get us where we are today.”

According to information posted by the County of Lake’s Health Department on the COVID-19 dashboard, Lake County’s positivity rate as of press time Thursday was 3.6 percent for the past seven day period, an increase of 0.6 percent from a week ago. Lake County is currently in the state’s Red Tier with 36 active cases.

For her part Nezhura said, “We have to continue doing a good job as a state to spend down our vaccine inventory in order to maximize our vaccine allocation,” adding that the state’s current network can vaccinate about 3 million people per week if all the sites which are currently in the network are opened up to maximum capacity.

According to Nezhura, Blue Shield is working hard to ensure that all across the state the infrastructure is in place so that when vaccine supplies increase they can be put in arms right away. She said this is being done in several ways including creating a statewide network of providers, citing geographically diverse mega sites and bringing on mobile providers.

Questions from attendees included whether shots will be needed in 2022 for those who have already been vaccinated and how long the vaccine protections last, the need for equitable access to the vaccine for the developmentally disabled and whether it was true COVID-19 variants are being driven by the vaccine, especially between the first and second shots. Others sought a timetable of when healthy people under 65 can realistically hope to be vaccinated.

Future streams and Town Halls can be viewed at the Senator’s Facebook page and on his website at https://sd02.senate.ca.gov.

“The good news is that we are way down from where we were at the peak.” — Dr. Timothy Brewer, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and Geffen School of Medicine