The promise of expanding coronavirus vaccination in Sonoma County collided on Monday with the realities of vaccine shortages and extreme weather elsewhere, increasing expected dose deliveries.
The supply problems were so severe that one of the county’s largest health care providers, Sutter Health, decided to stop scheduling all appointments for the first doses and planned to reschedule appointments for the second dose for some patients.
Friday’s announcement that the county would immediately open immunizations for residents aged 65 and over, as well as for food production employees, restaurants and grocery stores – the biggest individual expansion of vaccine eligibility here, with about 63,000 eligible people the most – it looked like a watershed.
For Kevin Cronin and his team at Rosso Pizzeria & Wine Bar in Santa Rosa, the wait to be vaccinated against COVID-19 continues.
“Everyone who works for me now wants to be vaccinated,” said Cronin on Monday. “But it is very difficult to know how to handle this. Like, I don’t know personally. They say to call your primary care provider. So you call them and they say, ‘We don’t know’.
In fact, appointments for the shots remain extremely difficult to secure. And the county’s growing eligibility comes at a particularly difficult time in the vaccination effort that began in December.
The county on Monday closed several vaccination clinics for at least a day and doctors rationed the doses because of the disruption of national distribution of vaccine shipments caused by last week’s cold weather and power outages elsewhere in the country, notably in Texas.
“It’s very frustrating,” said Dr. Urmila Shende, director of Sonoma County COVID-19 vaccine. “Mainly because we have developed all these partnerships with different clinics and we are ready to increase capacity. But what can you do with Mother Nature? “
The county had an affiliated clinic at Sonoma Valley High School closed on Sunday, and two more at Sonoma Veterans Memorial Hall (both were through Sonoma Valley Health Partners) and Rancho Cotate High School (through the County Education Office) Sonoma) closed on Monday while their partners waited for a week-long shipment of 5,100 doses of the Modern vaccine.
The doses did not arrive again on Monday, causing county officials to struggle to destroy an additional clinic scheduled for Tuesday at the Grace Pavilion at the Santa Rosa fairground run by the Sonoma County Medical Association. Another clinic on Tuesday, on the campus of Colégio Santa Rosa Júnior in Petaluma, will work as planned, but will administer only the 84 doses that the Petaluma Health Center already had in hand; this will cancel another 252 appointments.
Sonoma Valley Health Partners planned to host another clinic in the veterans’ salon on Tuesday, but decided not to schedule appointments due to the vaccine shortage.
County health officials said they received kits containing syringes, vials and other vaccination supplies on Monday. Shende took this as a good sign, because these shipments usually precede additional doses of the vaccine by 24 hours.
Unlike Sutter Health, Providence St. Joseph, the operator of Santa Rosa Memorial, Petaluma Valley and Healdsburg hospitals, has enough doses to meet his appointment schedule for the week, said Northern California pharmacy director Saad Sultan. Kaiser Permanente also said that there are no delays in vaccination schedules.
West County Health Centers are taking an approach similar to Sutter’s. Chief Executive Jason Cunningham said the nonprofit is running out of three boxes of vaccine doses this week. They have administered about 250 first doses a day at their clinics at Analy High School and Guerneville School, and have been scheduled to add 250 second doses to this week.
“Instead, we are just vaccinating the 250-second doses and holding new doses until we are guaranteed a sufficient supply,” said Cunningham.
Mendocino County health officials said on Monday that they were also opening up vaccination eligibility for residents 65 and older.
The increased demand for injections is putting even more pressure on the overloaded collection of vaccine booking portals available to residents of Sonoma County. As of Monday, none of the sites linked to SoCoEmergency.org showed any vacancies, except for the OptumServe clinic in Rohnert Park. The first consultation available there was March 18th.
Despite Monday’s pitfalls, many welcomed the county’s decision on Friday to expand eligibility for vaccination to residents aged 65 to 69. It finally aligned the county with age criteria across the state, after California Governor Gavin Newsom announced on January 13 that everyone in the state was 65 or older was immediately eligible for coronavirus immunization. But Sonoma County, which already faced a shortage of vaccine doses last month, initially set the local standard at 75. Two weeks ago, the county expanded eligibility for people 70 and older.
Cronin, the owner of Rosso Pizzeria, was well aware of the study published by medical researchers at UC San Francisco in January, concluding that among the 25 jobs across the state with at least 100 deaths from a pandemic, the most dangerous was line cook. Bakers and chefs ranked 4th and 11th, respectively, reflecting the high risk associated with the closed environment and the hectic activity of most restaurant kitchens.
Dean Molsberry, owner of Molsberry’s Market in the Larkfield-Wikiup neighborhood, has 72 employees, most wanting to be vaccinated, realizing the risk related to the virus they face on a daily basis.
“If you are a verifier, you are dealing with customers all day, all customers who go through the checkout,” said Molsberry. “You are dealing with money, because people still want to pay with money. People are now bringing bags. They go shopping in your bags, so they’re touching everything you’re touching. “
Molsberry said that the owners of Cal-Mart in Calistoga provided a mobile vaccination team to the market to administer the doses. But this is Napa County. Molsberry was unable to gather information on whether this would work in Sonoma County.
“Even if we had to send rows of people (to Napa County), I would have no problem doing that,” he said.
Once the vaccine supply reaches the demands of both seniors and food professionals, knowing how to use a computer to sign up will continue to be one of the greatest barriers to vaccinating against a scourge that has killed more than 500,000 Americans.
“I’m not a computer guy,” said Cronin. “I’m an entrepreneur, I know how to get around, but I’m not like some of these young people. But the guys in my kitchen just don’t know how to do it. “
You can contact Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or [email protected]. On Twitter @Skinny_Post.