Los Angeles plans to turn its massive coronavirus test site at Dodger Stadium into a vaccine distribution center this week, with officials hoping to vaccinate up to 12,000 people a day when the site is fully operational, city and county officials announced at night of Sunday.
Dodger Stadium is the largest testing site in the country, processing thousands of residents a day. The site has administered more than 1 million tests since May.
Test operations at Dodger Stadium will end on Monday, according to a statement from Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office. City and county officials also plan to end testing at the Veterans Affairs Lot 15 site, close to Jackie Robinson Stadium, to transfer personnel, equipment and other resources to distribute the vaccine.
“Vaccines are the safest way to defeat this virus and chart a path to recovery, so the city, the county and our entire team are putting our best resources into the field to vaccinate Angelenos as quickly, safely and efficiently as possible” . Garcetti said in the statement.
The county’s testing capacity will be temporarily reduced during the transition at the sites, but the change will more than triple the daily number of vaccines available for Angelenos. The city plans to continue offering free trials to residents, with or without symptoms, at eight permanent locations and six mobile locations in Los Angeles. In the coming weeks, testing will increase at existing locations, additional mobile locations and at Pierce College in Woodland Hills, the launch said.
The transition to vaccine distribution occurs when California and the rest of the country are slow to administer COVID-19 vaccines.
On Friday, Governor Gavin Newsom set a goal of administering vaccines to an additional 1 million people over the next nine days, recognizing that the state’s efforts to distribute life-saving supplies “were not good enough”.
Although California received more than 2 million doses of vaccine, as of Friday less than a third has been administered to frontline health care workers and residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities who are eligible for the first round of vaccinations.
The vaccine’s launch was also hampered by the reluctance of some frontline health professionals to take it. Approximately 20% to 40% of LA county frontline employees who received the vaccine at the end of the year refused to take it, according to county public health officials.
State officials recently expanded who can qualify for vaccination, allowing teachers, day care centers and people over 75 to be vaccinated if there is a risk that doses will expire.
In LA County, 145,621 of the initial doses of the COVID-19 vaccine were administered – just over a third of those received – on January 7, according to county public health data.
The announcement that Dodger Stadium would transition to a vaccine distribution site was first reported by KNX-AM (1070).
California also faces a steady increase in deaths from COVID-19. On Saturday night, the state recorded an average of 451 deaths a day in the previous week, a record. On Sunday, the state has eclipsed 30,000 deaths since the pandemic began.
LA County now averages 211 COVID-19 deaths per day, also a record.
Times Rong-Gong Lin II team writers Vanessa MartÃnez, Swetha Kannan and Melody Gutierrez contributed to this report.