Starting on Saturday, January 23, Orange County will have a second mass vaccination center in Aliso Viejo, saving senior citizens in the southern county with commitments to obtain a COVID-19 vaccine on a trip to Anaheim and increasing the capacity to OC Health Care Agency’s daily vaccination in thousands.
Disneyland Super POD (distribution point), a tent that opened last week in one of the theme park’s parking lots, is vaccinating about 3,000 people a day. Eventually, the site will handle up to 8,000 a day, and a drive-thru system is on the table, public health officials said.
Ideally, the second county center at Soka University outside Wood Canyon Drive will process 4,000 to 5,000 people a day, said Dr. Margaret Bredehoft, deputy director of the Public Health Services agency at the Health Care Agency.
“All of this really depends on the (vaccine) supply we have at hand,” she said. “This is really the bottleneck in Orange County” – as well as elsewhere.
On Thursday, Bredehoft said the county health team had 66,000 vaccines on hand, many of which would be allocated to community clinics, local pharmacies and other medical facilities that do not receive large shipments directly from state or federal agencies. Another portion, according to her, will be used in vaccination posts in the municipality.
Major health chains in several counties order their own batches of vaccine from the state government, but since many health providers in Orange County have not yet started efforts to vaccinate their covered elders, the county has had to absorb a huge wave of demand.
So far, county officials and volunteers, part of their Operation Independence vaccine campaign, have administered injections to about 65,000 people on their Anaheim super site and mobile pop-up sites, Bredehoft said.
Two mobile single-day clinics have been set up so far this month in areas with high concentrations of vulnerable elderly people, she said. But they were only for guests, organized with the help of groups of elderly people.
More are planned, but to avoid a run on these sites, health officials are purposely keeping their time and location a secret, sharing information only with people chosen to register.
Bredehoft said the news spread prematurely about one of these temporary clinics and that “mass hysteria” followed.
“Everyone came without an appointment, we needed police and it really got dangerous,” she said. “We had to close.”
The Health Care Agency will launch mobile PODs, ideally a few a week, Bredehoft said, to get coronavirus injections into the arms of more than 600,000 people aged 65 and over in Orange County, passing through their neighborhoods.
In total, about 109,000 vaccines were administered in Orange County as of last Sunday – mostly for frontline health workers, first responders and, more recently, people 65 and older, according to the latest figures from the Health Care Agency .
The county unit is not without its faults: many elderly people reported having trouble navigating the county’s Othena website and phone app, which should be used to schedule a vaccine appointment.
Bredehoft, like other county officials this week, urged the public to be patient while some wrinkles are fixed. Despite initial problems, tens of thousands of people have been vaccinated in county locations so far, she said.
“I prefer to try to fix something that is broken than to sit and do nothing,” she said.
Although some people have been frustrated by the long waiting times, Fifth District supervisor Lisa Bartlett said that the Soka website will provide a second option to help ease the burden.
“If one site is grayed out, they should select the second site,” she said. “We don’t want people to sit at their computers and update constantly.”
In addition, Othena has recently been updated to allow users to provide their information and register and then receive an email with a four-hour window in which they need to respond and schedule their scene.
“We are in unprecedented times. It is a new pandemic with new vaccines, ”said Bredehoft. “Be patient with us. Yes, we want to hear your feedback, but with anything, it takes time to incorporate that feedback and get it going. ”
Bredehoft said that anyone who needs help with Othena registration should call the Health Agency hotline, 714-834-2000.
The team writer, Erika I. Ritchie, contributed to this report.