Amid woes, vaccine change eyed
Distribution: Limited supply, high demand impede progress in state
Bay Area governments and health care providers are opening new sites to administer vaccines and ramping up the number of shots given per day, as California tries to catch up with much of the rest of the country in doling out doses amid the worst surge of the pandemic.
Local officials said Friday that the vaccine rollout is cramped by limited supply and a deluge in demand from residents over the age of 65 deemed eligible by the state to get immunizations this week, with some counties also citing the need for personnel, facilities and time to scale up operations. California, which has administered 1.2 million of the roughly 3 million vaccines it’s received to date, has had one of the slowest rollouts of any state.
“We’ve got to increase the pace and distribution and the administration of these vaccines,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said during the opening of a mass vaccination site at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles on Friday. “The reality is we need to get these vaccines out of the freezer and we need to get them into people’s arms.”
The need for vaccination gained urgency on Friday as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that a highly transmissible virus variant that spread rapidly through the United Kingdom could account for half of U.S. cases by March. The mutations don’t make the virus deadlier, the report said, but because the transmission rate is higher, it will lead to more cases and deaths overall compared to the current variant.
The news came as the pandemic’s global death toll topped 2 million Friday. Across California, the percentage of tests that come back positive has been declining, Newsom said, as have new cases and hospitalizations. In the Bay Area, a spike in deaths in the postholiday surge appears to be past its peak, although intensive care capacity remains low.
As local and state governments struggle to cope with the surge and vaccinate the vulnerable, Presidentelect Joe Biden announced Friday he would use the Defense Production Act to help meet his goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans in his first 100 days.
Santa Clara County counsel James Williams said Friday recent political chaos with the outgoing administration has made the already frustrating vaccine rollout even worse. On Friday, the Washington Post reported that a promised federal stockpile of vaccines was in fact empty. Newsom said he did not anticipate that the glitch would impair Californians’ ability to get their second dose in a twoshot regimen, but said he that was based on assurances from the federal government, and “We are now mindful of the importance to verify that information.”
Carrie Owen Plietz, president of Kaiser Permanente’s Northern California region, said Friday at a news conference with San Francisco officials that as soon as more vaccines come in, the health system is trying to get people access to them.
“As soon as we receive vaccines, we are actively working to get them into arms of individuals,” she said.
San Francisco plans to open three mass vaccination sites with the goal of administering at least 10,000 or more vaccine doses a day, Mayor London Breed and Health Director Dr. Grant Colfax announced on Friday, but first the city needs sufficient supply.
“Vaccine doses remain limited. We’re ready for more doses, we need more doses, we are asking for more doses,” Breed said. “We are not sitting on any vaccines. They are all moving out the door.”
In Alameda County, officials could convert the Oakland Coliseum into a mass coronavirus vaccination site as soon as February. The Coliseum has previously been used as a coronavirus testing facility, a polling place and a distribution point for the flu vaccine.
In Contra Costa County, private and public health systems have given out about 36,000 of nearly 72,000 doses so far, with 33,000 more doses on the way, officials said at a news conference on Friday. Dr. Ori Tzvieli, county operations chief for COVID19 response, said scaling up vaccine operations is much more complex than testing.
The county has opened 20 vaccination sites and plans to add more in Antioch and Richmond next week.
“We’re at the beginning of the biggest public health immunization campaign in history,” county Supervisor Diane Burgis said at a vaccination site in Pleasant Hill Friday. “We ask that everyone be patient. Your turn will come and when it is your turn, we urge you to get vaccinated.”
The county is partnering with paramedics to potentially administer vaccines and considering opening a mass vaccination site, but doesn’t have enough doses to do so yet, Tzvieli said.
Limited supply isn’t enough to meet the current demand since California opened up its process for residents above the age of 65 to get vaccines on Wednesday. Overwhelming interest to book appointments on Thursday caused the Sutter Health website to crash and left some people on hold for hours with Kaiser Permanente. Contra Costa County Health Services’ website is getting around 1,000 appointment requests an hour, health director Anna Roth said.
On Thursday, Kaiser received four times the normal call volume into just one call center, Plietz of Kaiser said on Friday. The system was still reporting an “extremely high” call volume and wait times Friday, a spokesperson said. By the end of next week, Kaiser expects to have online selfservice tools that will let eligible individuals schedule an appointment if vaccine supply is available.
A Sutter spokeswoman said Friday the website was back up, but wait times would still be long. The health system is prioritizing giving shots to health care workers and those over age 75.
Contra Costa County Health Services is also prioritizing those over the age of 75, while still accepting information and scheduling later appointments for people over 65, Tzvieli said. The county hopes to vaccinate everyone in the eligible age group before the end of February.
In Marin County, more than one third of the population is in the current tier of vaccination eligibility, including those over 65. Dr. Matt Willis, the county public health officer, said demand would exceed supply for a few weeks and asked healthier seniors to be patient.
In Sonoma County, Dr. Sundari Mase, the county’s Interim Health Officer, said in a news briefing on Friday that “the rollout is going to depend on the supply of vaccines.” She expected teachers will be vaccinated the first week of February and said the county is working with its human resources department, police and EMS to vaccinate other essential workers on schedule.
“If we have the supply of vaccines that continues, I don’t think it’s going to bump anybody out of the current plan,” she said.
On Thursday, local hospitals were caring for 2,106 coronavirus patients, the lowest number in 10 days. It’s a bright spot, but Bay Area leaders said they’re still very worried about the current intensive care availability. The number of deaths recorded Friday was the highest since the start of the pandemic — with 688 deaths attributed to the coronavirus by early evening — and ICU availability in the Bay Area region, which includes the nine counties as well as Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, remained worryingly low, at 3.4%.
“This is not time to let down our guard,” Santa Clara County Supervisor Otto Lee said at a news briefing Friday. “All it takes is one time, a family eating a nice dinner together with their masks down, to spread this. Please, hunker down for a little bit more, a few months more.”