COVID-19 shot pace better than expected Still, rate is slowing and that has experts worried

Remember when COVID-19 vaccines were as elusive as your car keys on Monday morning and harder to snag than Rolling Stones tickets?

The jabs started rolling out to more people in February and, after a slow start, California has clocked an impressive pace.

On Feb. 16, according to state data, just 6.3 million doses had been administered, mostly to health workers, the elderly and those at high risk of complications. Three months later, 36.5 million jabs have entered arms, an increase

of 30 million in just three months.

To date, a solid majority of Californians 12 and older — 62.5% — have had at least one shot, according to data from the California Department of Public Health. That's better than the nation as a whole, where 61.6% have been jabbed, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“We spend a lot of time focusing on ‘it's not good enough,' but the fact that we are where we are right now, we wouldn't have expected this a year ago,” said Richard Carpiano, a public health scientist and medical sociologist at UC Riverside. “We should celebrate that. The more people you can vaccinate, and the faster you can do it, the better.”

Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist and demographer at UCI Irvine, agrees.

“If you would have told me in December that on June 1 we'd be where we are right now, I would have said, ‘Yowsa. Yeah, that's praiseworthy,' ” Noymer said.

But the vaccination pace is slowing. Southern California's inland counties lag behind their coastal cousins in vaccine uptake. While clearly making progress toward “herd immunity,” where the virus essentially fizzles out for lack of new hosts, which experts expect if 70% to 90% of everyone is vaccinated, reaching millions of people who can't or won't be jabbed yet is proving a heavy lift.

“Right now, we still get a passing grade, but it's like the barometer is falling,” Noymer said. “That means a storm is coming, but not that it's raining right now.”

The push now to vaccinate younger people in wealthy nations is harshly criticized by poorer ones that don't have enough vaccine to protect their health care workers and elderly.

“The ongoing vaccine crisis is a scandalous inequity that is perpetuating the pandemic,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, at the opening of its international meeting on Monday. “More than 75% of all vaccines have been administered in just 10 countries.

“There is no diplomatic way to say it: a small group of countries that make and buy the majority of the world's vaccines control the fate of the rest of the world. The number of doses administered globally so far would have been enough to cover all health workers and older people, if they had been distributed equitably. We could have been in a much better situation.”

Progress at home

According to state and county data, among those eligible for shots in California:

• In Los Angeles County, 9.5 million have received at least one shot, for a 62.5% rate.

• In Orange County, 3.1 million doses have been administered, close on L.A.'s heels at 60%.

• In Riverside, 1.9 million shots have entered arms for a rate of 48%.

• In San Bernardino, 1.5 million have gotten jabs, just shy of half at 49.8%.

The percentages are for people 16 and older, except for Riverside, which includes those 12 and up.

But when viewed through the lens of total population that has had at least one shot — not solely those currently eligible — it's clear that the holy grail of herd immunity is a long way off.

Even in one of the most vaccinated states in one of the world's most vaccinated nations, there's much work to do before the virus fizzles for lack of new hosts, which means it can keep changing, perhaps into more dangerous versions that might endanger the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike.

Looking at total population, rather than just eligible population:

• About 53% of California's total population has been vaccinated. In L.A. and O.C., it's about 52%; in Riverside, it's about 41%; in San Bernardino, it's about 38%.

Inland Empire averages are dragged down because they have a higher proportion of young people who are not yet eligible for vaccines, according to census data. Hesitancy may play a role as well.

Nationwide, 164.4 million people have received at least one shot, which is 49.5% of the total population, according to the CDC. Of Americans over age 12, 58.6% are vaccinated, and of those over 18, 61.6% are vaccinated.

Is herd immunity achievable? Is it even important if those at greatest risk are vaccinated?

“It is important,” Carpiano said. “COVID isn't going away. It's still bad. But if we had 70, 80, 85% vaccinated, we'd have more localized pop-ups, not nationwide and statewide lockdowns. We could control it with contact tracing and quarantining. We could treat it like we would a measles outbreak. In that case, every additional person vaccinated is going to be important.”

Dr. Clayton Chau, county health officer and director of the OC Health Care Agency, said that we've only known about COVID-19 for some 18 months. We still don't know its long-term effects on the body, on the brain and, in particular, on young people.

“If the majority of the population accepts the vaccines, which are currently effective and safe by all indication, then COVID-19 will behave like our seasonal flu,” Chau said. “However, one needs to put things in perspective. The CDC estimates that an average of 36,000 people died of the seasonal flu each year. Over half a million of U.S. residents have died from COVID-19 so far.”

The issue, Noymer said, is that there are essentially two groups of people: those eager for the vaccine and those who aren't. The population is split pretty much right down the middle.

The first few months of the rollout went gangbusters because eager people rushed for shots, but now that the eagers are vaccinated, the pace slows because it's the not-so-eagers who are left.

In Israel, 63% of the total population has been vaccinated — more than 80% of those eligible — and its epidemic curve has slid so much it's beautiful, Noymer said.

“COVID has vanished there, for all intents and purposes,” he said. “So that's where we want to get to, and I'm worried we're stalling out.”

Easy access is vital to ensuring that as many people get jabbed as possible, Carpiano said. Not everyone can take time off from work or has a computer to make an appointment or a car to get there.

World dilemma

Experts stress that until everyone is safe, no one is safe and have railed against “vaccine apartheid” as rich countries gobble up vaccine doses and use them for people at lower risk, while those at higher risk abroad are left in the lurch.

In many African nations — Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Sudan, Niger, Mali and Ethiopia, among others — less than 1% of the total population has been vaccinated, according to the Our World In Data project.

In Egypt, 1.5%. Lybia, 1.6%. Iran, 2.4%.

In India, where a virus variant has ravaged the health care system and is spreading to other nations, only 11% of people have been vaccinated. In Mexico, the rate is 14%. In Brazil, it's 18%.

“Almost 18 months into the defining health crisis of our age, the world remains in a very dangerous situation,” said the WHO's Ghebreyesus. “As of today, more cases have been reported so far this year than in the whole of 2020. On current trends, the number of deaths will overtake last year's total within the next three weeks.”

Globally, there has been a drop in the number of cases and deaths reported, but “we remain in a fragile situation,” he said. “No country should assume it is out of the woods, no matter its vaccination rate. So far, no variants have emerged that significantly undermine the efficacy of vaccines, diagnostics or therapeutics. But there is no guarantee that will remain the case. … We must be very clear: The pandemic is not over, and it will not be over until and unless transmission is controlled in every last country.”

The WHO leader said he understands that every government has a duty to protect its own people and vaccinate its entire population. In time, there will be enough supply to do that. But right now, there is not, and he called for a “massive push” to vaccinate at least 10% of