While state and federal officials expanded eligibility for the vaccine this week, confused local health officials in the Bay Area are desperate for more doses to meet the demand of those who were already eligible.
Since Contra Costa County began allowing all residents aged 65 and over to apply for vaccination appointments – according to new guidelines released by health authorities in the United States and California – he has received 1,000 requests for hour, enough to meet your weekly dose allocation in 12 hours. The website of Sutter Health, a health care provider that vaccinates people in several counties, fell on Thursday due to high demand for vaccination research. To make matters worse, a federal stockpile of second-dose vaccines that had been factored into advance supplies actually ran out, throwing “chaos” into an already rocky implementation, in the words of a Santa Clara County official.
Contra Costa County has used half of its vaccine doses allocated so far, but it is not for want of trying. About 36,000 vaccines have been applied, and the other 36,000 have already been booked with appointments scheduled for the next few days and weeks. Another 33,000 are expected to arrive soon.
“The county is not just sitting on the other 36,000 doses,” said COVID-19 chief of operations, Dr. Ori Tzvieli, at a news conference on Friday morning. “We are rapidly increasing our efforts to vaccinate as many people as possible. We want to shoot guns. … But the mitigating step is really the amount of vaccine that we are getting ”.
By the end of next week, the county expects to administer 3,600 injections a day and increase that capacity to 5,800 a day next month. In Santa Clara County, authorities are increasing the number of vaccinations for the first phase of beneficiaries, from about 3,000 administered on Monday to 6,000 to be administered on Friday.
Dr. Jennifer Tong, associate medical director at Valley Medical Center, warned that it is only a small sample of the need.
“The biggest limitations we face now is the availability of the vaccine,” she said.
So far, the county has administered 32,352 first doses and 6,594 second doses of about 170,000 in the total allocated. Two mass vaccination sites on the county fairgrounds in downtown San Jose and a complex on Berger Drive in North San Jose will soon be accompanied by a large-capacity facility in Mountain View. An offer by the San Francisco 49ers to use Levi’s Stadium as another location is still being examined by the county.
If there were more doses arriving in Contra Costa County each week, Tzvieli would reassess the need for a mass vaccination site. But with the limited amount available, its 20 or so smaller sites across the county are proving more effective, he said. Two more will open in Richmond and Antioch next week.
“It’s all about supply,” said Tzvieli. “If I had 20,000 extra doses, I would get this in an instant, but I just don’t have those now.”
Santa Clara County Counselor James Williams said they also continue to struggle to find out how much vaccine capacity exists in the county, mainly because the hospital systems that serve most patients in South Bay, Kaiser and the Palo Alto Medical Foundation , are receiving vaccine doses directly from the state. Federal providers, such as CVS, Walgreens and VA, are also beyond your data reach.
“We don’t have full visibility into what they are doing,” said Williams.
Williams emphasized that expanding the vaccine eligibility status for residents age 65 and older does nothing to increase the supply of available vaccine, which is why the county has instituted its own 75-year age limit. At least 300,000 residents in Santa Clara County are at least 65 years old.
“The reality is that we have nothing close to that amount of vaccine to deliver,” he said. “We are seeing demand surpass supply and basic capacity for things like programming.”
Officials in Contra Costa County said they hope to vaccinate all 77,000 residents aged 75 and over “in the coming weeks”, but in the meantime, they have opened consultations for anyone aged 65 and over. For now, however, most vaccines on any given day still go to the frontline healthcare professionals and those over 75.
Williams also said that officials were discouraged by the revelation on Friday that an alleged stock of second doses did not exist.
“We learned this morning that there is no such stock,” he said. “This throws expectations on the vaccine delivery into chaos.”
He hopes that the promise of a truly nationally coordinated vaccine launch, promised by the next Biden government, will reverse what he calls the abdication of the Trump administration, which he said has devoted resources to a futile attempt to overthrow Biden’s election in the face of a pandemic whose death toll approaches 400,000 in the United States.
“It really diverted the federal government’s energy from its primary task, which is to protect and care for everyone in the United States,” said Williams.
But the new administration will face a unique challenge in a generation of inoculating hundreds of millions of Americans in the coming months with vaccines that are difficult to administer. Even in addition to the extreme demands of storage and transportation, healthcare professionals need to be trained on how to give the injection, and then additional staff is needed to monitor recipients within the next 15 minutes in case of allergic reactions. All of this must be done safely and socially at a distance.
“In closing,” said Tzvieli, “all of this is being built as we face the biggest outbreak of the pandemic, which is already affecting our limited resources.”