In 
Spencer Custodio |
Orange County seniors aged 65 and older can now obtain coronavirus vaccines after county public health officials have pushed the vulnerable group up to priority levels.
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County public health officer and director of the OC Health Care Agency, Dr. Clayton Chau, said an emergency vaccination task force meeting was held on Sunday night.
“Almost all of them signed that call on Sunday night,” Chau said in the County Supervisors’ public virus update on Tuesday. “We will start vaccinating elderly people aged 65 and over in Orange County, adding them to Level 1a.”
Health workers and first responders are also listed in this layer.
The new impetus for the elderly comes after widespread criticism of slow vaccination, not only in the OC, but across the state.
After seeing slow implementation, state public health officials called local health departments across the state, warning them to increase vaccination efforts or risk missing some of their doses.
“The state was in a panic,” said Chau.
Chau told supervisors that Orange County received additional doses from other counties “who cannot do this fast enough”.
“So we had 170,000 doses allocated for us. We left nothing, ”said Chau. “Because we left nothing in the state, the state this morning just gave us 6,000 more doses.”
Renewed vaccination efforts also come after concerns from doctors, dentists, nurses, health care and other health professionals not connected to hospitals.
Hospital staff were the first to start the two-part vaccination process last month, when OC received the vaccines.
Chau said the elderly should contact their primary care doctors to help make appointments to start vaccinations.
“We have a pharmacy salesman who works with us for free,” said Chau.
According to a press release at the end of last year, hundreds of care centers for the elderly are scheduled to receive vaccines.
“The program will allow counties to leverage CVS and Walgreens pharmacies’ staff to administer the vaccine more widely, with pharmacy staff going directly to health facilities. Qualified nursing units will receive vaccine from the CVS and Walgreens staff. Approximately 72 qualified nursing facilities and 900 residential care facilities for the elderly will be vaccinated by CVS and Walgreens across Orange County, ”the statement said.
Chau said county officials are also looking to create smaller vaccination sites for the vulnerable population, who shouldn’t be around large crowds.
Efforts to vaccinate the elderly come after dozens of elderly readers expressed concerns about receiving their first doses via emails to Voice of OC.
Meanwhile, medical workers are being vaccinated at three locations across the county, including the Orange County Fire Authority’s headquarters in Irvine.
Eligible workers – doctors, nurses and medical assistants – must record make an appointment in advance, there are no visits.
Locals are estimated to vaccinate 800 to 1,000 people a day, according to County Health Agency officials in an email on Tuesday.
As of Tuesday afternoon, there were no appointments available.
“Check regularly,” said the website.
Disneyland is scheduled to become the first of five vaccination supersites.
Last week, Oliver Chi, city manager for Huntington Beach, told Voice of OC the other big vaccination sites will be at Knott’s Berry Farm, Orange County Fairgrounds, The Great Park and Soka University.
Chau said “there are rumors” that the federal government will send more vaccines to California.
But at a news conference on Tuesday, the secretary of the state Health and Human Services Agency, Dr. Mark Ghaly, did not give details on when more vaccines will arrive in the state.
Ghaly said they will announce the “prospect of obtaining additional supplies of vaccines in the coming days”.
The state has set a target of 1 million new vaccines by the end of the week.
Orange County public health officials have set a herd immunity target by July 4 – meaning that 70%, or more than 2.2 million people, will have to be vaccinated by then to achieve that goal.
Chau said the five major vaccination sites need to administer about 8,000 doses a day for the OC to meet its July 4 target.
There is still no deadline for the opening of major sites.
“We are going to implement it based on the amount of vaccine we can get in Orange County. So we are not going to open them all if the vaccine is not available, ”said Chau.
While authorities are competing for more vaccines, hospitalizations in the county have declined slightly.
On Tuesday, 2,200 people were hospitalized, including 535 in intensive care units, according to the county health agency.
“It is currently the largest number of people in the hospital compared to our summer peak,” Chau said at Tuesday’s supervisors’ meeting.
The hospitalization trend appears to be stabilizing somewhat this week, after daily figures have kept records breaking for at least one consecutive month.
But deaths are increasing.
The virus has killed 2,148 people out of 195,685 confirmed cases, including 28 new deaths reported on Tuesday.
Newly reported deaths may extend for weeks due to delays in reporting.
Last week, 222 new deaths were reported.
The OC also saw 3,824 new cases reported Tuesday.
The county averaged more than 3,300 new cases a day last week.
State public health officials estimate that about 12% of all infected people end up hospitalized in three weeks.
This means that there may be more than 2,700 people hospitalized in the coming weeks, as hospitals are discharging stabilized patients as quickly as possible.
The virus has killed more than three times as many people as the flu on an annual average.
For contextual purposes, Orange County has averaged about 20,000 deaths per year since 2016, including 543 annual flu deaths, according to state health data.
According to state mortality statistics, cancer kills more than 4,600 people, heart disease kills more than 2,800, more than 1,400 die from Alzheimer’s disease and strokes kill more than 1,300 people.
Orange County has already exceeded the annual average of 20,000 deaths, with 21,110 deaths by November, according to the latest status data available.
It is a difficult virus to be fought by the medical community because some people have no symptoms, but they can still spread it. Others experience mild symptoms, such as fatigue and low-grade fever.
Others end up in the ICU for days and weeks before escaping, while others die from the virus.
Ghaly said the first figures indicate that the dreaded holiday increase is not as officials initially thought, but said it was too early to say whether the cases arising from the holiday season would create another peak after the peak.
“We still expect to see an increase in the middle of the month.”
Here is the latest information on virus numbers in Orange County from county data:
Infections | Hospitalizations and deaths | City to city data | Demography
Spencer Custodio is a reporter on the Voice of OC team. You can reach it at [email protected] Follow him on Twitter @SpencerCustodio