In 
Spencer Custodio and Hosam Elattar |
Private health care physicians, emergency care physicians and elderly Orange County residents will soon receive coronavirus vaccines after pressure from local doctors and state public health officials to increase vaccinations.
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The reformed deployment efforts occur when 2,259 people are in the hospital, the highest count so far during the pandemic.
Dr. Michelle Hure has been a leading advocate for vaccinating more people, including community health workers, after raising her concerns last month.
Hure, a private physician who practices dermatological pathology, said there will be a major vaccination program at the headquarters of the Orange County Medical Association, provisionally scheduled for January 16-17.
“I managed to get one of the nursing schools to provide about 200 nursing students, and their supervisors RNs (registered nurses) – all of whom are going to vaccinate,” said Hure in a telephone interview on Friday. “I also got around 60 doctors from the community to sign up.”
Pharmacies are also preparing to vaccinate vulnerable elderly people, according to state officials, who are being criticized for delays in vaccinations.
Hure was in line to get his first shot at the Orange County Fire Department in Irvine during the phone interview.
She said she tried to get her first dose on Thursday, but things got complicated because the team was not checking credentials, similar to experiences when Los Angeles County launched a similar program last week.
As of Friday, the team was much more rigid, said Hure.
“You had to show the time of the appointment, you had to show an identification that you are a nurse or doctor or an MA, – your pay stub. They are checking everything. It’s legitimate now, ”said Hure.
Ruksana Omar, who cares for the elderly in a OC nursing home, said she was excited to receive her first dose of the two-part vaccine on Friday at OCFA headquarters.
JULIE LEOPO, Voice of OC
Ruksana Omar, 61, an elderly caregiver in Orange County, cried after receiving her first dose of the coronavirus vaccine. January 8, 2021.
Meanwhile, OC Health Care Agency officials are planning to launch at least five vaccination supersites.
“The first of these super-pods should be up and running next week,” said Oliver Chi, city manager for Huntington Beach, who is also part of the county’s vaccination task force.
Chi said the goal is to vaccinate everyone in the county who wants one by July 4 through supersites.
“We hope to have somewhere between that vaccination rate of 70 and 85% across the county, so that we get to the point that the CDC currently considers it safe to reopen everything at that point,” said Chi in a Friday interview by phone.
“With the goal being then, we have returned to a pre-COVID lifestyle here in our region.”
Chi said the sites have been identified and are being finalized. There will be one at Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, Orange County Fairgrounds, The Great Park and Soka University.
State public health officials are asking counties to distribute vaccines to medical workers and the elderly who live in nursing homes after they changed their approach.
“To maximize vaccine delivery and reduce the potential for waste, local health departments and providers should promptly administer COVID-19 vaccines to individuals in all layers of Phase 1a”, Says the Thursday press release from the California Department of Public Health.
State officials are also expanding eligibility for the first rounds of vaccines.
“In addition to frontline health professionals, this includes a wide range of people in health settings, such as community health professionals, public health staff, primary care clinics, specialist clinics, laboratory workers, dental clinics and staff pharmacy ”, says the press release.
Officials at the Orange County Fire Authority headquarters said they were following state guidelines on Friday.
JULIE LEOPO, Voice of OC
Queues of people await their first round of double vaccination against coronavirus at the Orange County Fire Authority headquarters in Irvine. January 8, 2021.
State recommendations come after some confusion in vaccination guidelines – state vaccination guidelines put primary care physicians at the second level of the first phase, while the guidelines the county apparently used to have the private practice team a higher priority.
OC Health Care Agency officials also updated the county’s vaccination plan on Wednesday.
According to the updated guidelines, OC officials now aim to vaccinate paramedics, nursing home and resident staff, laboratory workers, dental clinics, primary care providers, community health workers and specialist clinics such as dialysis centers .
The OC and the state’s new approach to inoculations comes after state public health officials called local health departments across the state on Tuesday in an effort to increase vaccine distribution.
The calls came a day after Governor Gavin Newsom warned the slow implementation of vaccines as “not good enough” at a news conference on Monday.
Newsom said that only about a third of the 1.3 million vaccines were administered.
Since then, hundreds of thousands of vaccinations have been administered and state officials plan to vaccinate 1 million Californians by the end of next week.
Meanwhile, Orange County hospitals face waves of coronavirus patients.
As of Friday, 2,259 people have been hospitalized, including 514 in intensive care units, according to state data – registration numbers for Orange County.
As of Thursday, the latest figures available from the county Health Agency, 1,972 people have been killed by the virus.
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.
The coronavirus is also spreading like a fire in OC prisons.
More than 1,000 inmates are infected – an increase of more than 1,200% over four weeks ago, when 74 inmates were infected.
At the end of last month, about 120 homeless people tested positive for the virus in 16 different shelters.
So far, the virus killed an inmate.
OC sheriff Don Barnes must face tough questions in court today about how you handled the outbreaks in prison.
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 moderate fever.
Others end up in the ICU for days and weeks before escaping, while others die from the virus.
Meanwhile, state public health officials are preparing for more deaths and have instituted a mass mortality program to deal with the waves of people dying from the virus.
“The plan was designed to provide mutual assistance to county coroners and will address the increase in storage needed to mitigate the bottleneck caused by an increase in fatalities. The increase that is already beginning to occur has caused hospitals to release an increasing number of fatalities for county coroners, who then must hold the bodies until they can send them to funeral homes to be processed for burial, ” says one Press release from the State Emergency Services Secretariat.
Some OC families are experiencing delays in burying their dead as bodies are piling up in some county hospitals.
Nurse Gemma Seidl, who is also the executive director of intensive care at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Orange, said she saw an accumulation of funeral services.
“We have families who have already provided mortuary services, but the morgues themselves cannot take the bodies because they have no place. That’s why they’ll be staying in our morgue for a while. ”
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