The Bay Area professional sports franchises are eager to see their stadiums turn into massive COVID-19 vaccination sites, but neither the team nor the local authorities seem to know if and when that will happen.
Spokesmen for the San Francisco Giants, Oakland A’s, San Jose Sharks and San Jose Earthquakes confirmed that their organizations have been in contact with government officials and local health providers about the use of stadiums as vaccination centers. San Francisco 49ers CEO Al Guido even turned to social media to offer Levi’s Stadium so that Santa Clara County residents could get vaccinated.
During a news conference on Wednesday, Santa Clara County councilor James Williams said the county has not yet received enough vaccines to inoculate all local health workers.
“We don’t know how much vaccine will arrive in the county,” said Williams. “And that is really a challenge.”
Petco Park in San Diego has become a “super vaccination station” this week, opening its doors so that 5,000 people can receive vaccines daily. The parking lot at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, the largest site for coronavirus testing in the United States, will transform into a vaccination center where 12,000 people can be vaccinated every day by the end of this week.
In the Bay Area, the vaccine delivery process presented a variety of challenges, leading to widespread frustration.
Santa Clara County executive Dr. Jeff Smith told the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday that the county recently ordered an additional 100,000 doses of the state’s COVID-19 vaccines. The order was fulfilled with the guarantee that only 6,000 vaccines are on the way.
“As soon as we reach the 18th (of January), we will be able to administer 35,000 doses weekly with one huge caveat,” Smith told the board. “At the moment, we don’t have enough in our freezers to last a week, let alone be able to make 35,000 a week.”
San Francisco’s Director of Public Health, Dr. Grant Colfax, said that opening a mass vaccination site is also a consideration, but like Santa Clara County, San Francisco lacks sufficient doses.
“When we have a sufficient supply of vaccines to meet the need for a mass vaccination site, we hope to have that site up and running,” said Colfax on Tuesday. “Our goal is to open these sites as soon as possible when the state provides us with more vaccines. We really need to get more doses and go through the phases of the state levels. ”
One of the most significant obstacles that county officials faced in the first month of distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines is tracking the number of people who received them. The federal government has allocated vaccines directly to state health departments, companies like CVS and Walgreens to administer in long-term care facilities, as well as to Veterans Affairs hospitals and Indian health centers. State officials have supplied huge quantities of vaccines directly to health care providers in several counties, such as Kaiser Permanente, Palo Alto Medical Foundation and Sutter Health, as well as county health departments to local public and private hospitals like Stanford.
The California Department of Public Health tracked the number of vaccines distributed (about 2.5 million) and the number of people who received them (889,000). But so far, the state has not created an easily accessible public panel with detailed data on vaccines.
In Santa Clara County, a health order implemented last week now requires vaccine providers to deliver data daily, which includes the number of vaccines that have been administered, available consultations per day, unused vaccines, clinics and information about who has been vaccinated. In San Francisco, District 6 Supervisor Matt Haney is advocating a similar level of transparency.
“There is a lot of irregularity in the distribution of the vaccine and access to information on how many vaccines we have and will receive,” said Haney. “Some counties are receiving more doses of vaccine than San Francisco. Many doses of the vaccine are going to entities in several counties that are mostly private providers. But that said, counties can request more doses and should expect to receive tens of thousands of additional doses in the coming weeks. ”
With nearly two-thirds of vaccines distributed throughout the state still unused, California is far behind other states in its vaccination rate. The lack of transparent data has created a major problem because the local health departments responsible for updating the public about the vaccination process do not know how many doses private providers still need to deliver.
Some issues can be fixed soon, as officials in San Francisco and Santa Clara County expressed optimism that they will receive an influx of doses soon after President Joe Biden took office, but they also know that the ability to vaccinate a high percentage of the population. they depend on the urgency – and the willingness to cooperate – of private suppliers.
“We know that other providers in the county, like Stanford and Kaiser, are working to expand their own sites, including mass vaccination sites,” said Smith. “They receive direct vaccine distribution and have the majority of the county’s population.”
It is private providers, not county health departments, that can be the driving force behind transforming stadiums into mass vaccination sites. Municipalities, including Santa Clara and Alameda, have created online portals that allow people to sign up to be notified when it is their turn to vaccinate, but most residents are likely to receive their vaccines from private providers.
With Governor Gavin Newsom announcing on Wednesday that all Californians aged 65 and over can now be vaccinated, private providers are facing immense pressure to increase their vaccination process and find spaces outside hospitals and clinics to inoculate people.
In San Francisco, Haney sees a way for collaboration between private providers and the public health department to accelerate the vaccination process.
“In San Diego, at Petco, they are applying 5,000 vaccines a day with thousands of volunteers and a large public-private partnership to do this and we need it in San Francisco,” said Haney. “It seems to me common sense to use the websites and the opportunities we have to distribute this vaccine. The longer it takes to vaccinate everyone, the longer this pandemic will last ”.
Smith told the Board of Supervisors that the Santa Clara County Department of Public Health is looking for an enclosed location with ample parking, where 10,000-20,000 vaccines can be administered daily, but the site has not yet been finalized.
Although the SAP Center, home of the San Jose Sharks, is an obvious choice in Santa Clara County due to its size and the recent use of the site as a COVID-19 testing center, no local or team official has provided an indication that any area of the bay stadiums, with the exception of one exception, will be opened as a vaccination site in the immediate future.
That exception appears to be the Oakland Coliseum, as the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Authority is reviewing a ready-to-use plan on Friday that could allow healthcare professionals to transform the stadium’s extensive parking lots into a mass vaccination site soon after receiving approval.
Until vaccine data provided by public and private providers are made available in a centralized location and counties are clear about the number of doses available in their jurisdictions, it appears that the vaccination process for most Bay Area residents will remain a job. maddening.