On Saturday, Los Angeles County surpassed 1 million cases of coronavirus since reporting its first infection almost a year earlier and also recording its first occurrence of a new, more contagious variant of the virus that was initially identified in the UK.
The variant, B.1.1.7, had previously been found in San Diego and San Bernardino counties in California, as well as in 14 other U.S. states, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is believed not to make people sicker or to increase the risk of death, but it seems to spread more easily, increasing the fear that it could undermine efforts to control the pandemic by displacing other strains and becoming dominant in the region.
Authorities believe the variant has been around in LA County for some time and is already spreading in the community. The person who was contracted is a man who recently spent time in LA County, but has since traveled to Oregon, where he is currently isolated, officials said. Quest Labs in Washington confirmed the discovery, officials said.
Health experts have long feared that the new strain will bring even more challenges to a region that has become an epicenter of COVID-19 in America, bringing hospitals to the brink and infecting about 1 in 3 county residents since the beginning of the pandemic.
The authorities hope that rapid vaccination will be a weapon against the new strain, which Report from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched on Friday, said it will show “rapid growth in early 2021, becoming the predominant variant in March”
“The presence of the UK variant in Los Angeles County is worrying, as our health care system is already severely tense with more than 7,500 people hospitalized today,” said Barbara Ferrer, the county’s director of public health, in a statement.
The new milestone comes as COVID-19 cases begin to decline both in the county and elsewhere in California, although conditions in hospitals remain critical. LA County registered 13,291 new cases of the virus and 237 related deaths on Saturday, according to The Times count, bringing the total to 1,003,923 cases and 13,741 deaths.
“Our community is suffering from the winter wave, facing a large number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths, five times more than in the summer,” said Ferrer. “This more contagious variant makes it easier to spread infections in the workplace, in stores and in our homes.”
The discovery added even more urgency to the authorities’ rush to vaccinate as many people as possible before the variant was consolidated. The process was complicated by California’s decentralized public health system, in which local public health departments, already in charge of the immense amount of work associated with testing and contact tracking, are also responsible for prioritizing and distributing the vaccine.
There have also been reports of vaccine shortages at the federal level.
Although Governor Gavin Newsom announced on Wednesday that the state was expanding the vaccine’s eligibility to include everyone aged 65 and over, LA County is still working through vaccinating all of its eligible health professionals – those who had direct or indirect exposure to patients or infectious materials. (Health professionals who do not have routine face-to-face contact with the patient will be vaccinated at a later stage, officials said.)
The county’s public health department issued a broad appeal on Saturday for licensed health care professionals – including doctors, osteopathy doctors, medical assistants, nurses, licensed vocational nurses, dentists and pharmacists – to offer to vaccinate other health professionals during the unpaid period, 10 hour shifts in five “mega” distribution locations.
The venues are scheduled to open on Tuesday at the Pomona Fairplex, the Forum in Inglewood, Cal State Northridge, the LA County Education Office in Downey and Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, with hours available every day until 14 February, the county said.
In addition, the Los Angeles Dodger Stadium vaccine site began administering doses on Friday.
On Thursday, health professionals in LA County received more than 279,000 doses of the vaccine, including more than 219,000 first doses and more than 60,000 second doses, officials said, but estimated that some 450,000 health professionals still needed to be vaccinated.
County public health officials said they expected all qualified health workers to receive their first dose in the next two weeks and to move on to the next vaccination phase in early February. Those eligible in the next phase include people aged 65 and over, as well as those who work in education, day care, emergency services or food and agriculture and face risk of exposure.
Long Beach, which has its own public health department, moved on to the next phase on Friday, with Mayor Robert Garcia and other top city officials receiving the vaccine. Other newly qualified individuals include police officers and people aged 65 and over.
This happened after the city vaccinated some 15,000 health professionals and residents of long-term care facilities, Garcia said in a press release.
Next week, Long Beach will open clinics to vaccinate grocery workers and schedule clinics to vaccinate educators the following week, the statement said.
Other counties, including Riverside and Orange, have also started vaccinating those 65 and older and essential workers in certain sectors.
But there are reports that nominations have been difficult to obtain.
Around 4pm on Wednesday, Riverside County opened 5,600 appointments for vaccination clinics Thursday through Sunday at Corona High School, Heritage High School in Menifee, San Gorgonio Middle School in Beaumont, Indio Fairgrounds and Diamond Stadium at Lake Elsinore. The Diamond Stadium clinic was exclusively for people aged 65 and over.
All appointments were made until 7 pm, said spokeswoman Brooke Federico.
On Friday, the county made 11,000 more consultations available until January 22, and vacancies were filled in about two hours, she said.
In addition, the county said it received only enough vaccine from the state to cover clinics in operation over the weekend.
“At the moment, we have 14,346 doses in our hands as public health and that is just enough to go through the vaccine clinics we planned for Sunday,” said Kim Saruwatari, the county’s public health director, this Friday at a meeting. broadcast live with county officials. “And by the end of Sunday, we should be very close to leaving the vaccine as a public health department.”
An additional 100,479 doses were administered or sent to healthcare professionals to be administered in the next few days, she said. In contrast, the county estimates that more than 700,000 residents are currently eligible to receive the vaccine.
Saruwatari said the county normally receives weekly shipments from the state of about 35,000 to 40,000 doses, but the distribution is not accurate or regular.
“And this is one of the challenges that makes planning very difficult,” she said. “We don’t know when the vaccine will arrive with certainty and we don’t know how much we will be receiving at any given moment with any level of certainty.”
Orange County this week opened a large-scale vaccine distribution center in Disneyland and said it plans to open four more. But the sheer volume of people trying to get an appointment quickly overburdened the system, county supervisor Andrew Do said this week. He encouraged people to keep trying.
The vaccination site, along with two other minors, at the beginning of the week was overloaded by people who came without an appointment, which led them to “close effectively” for a while on Tuesday, the county said.
The platform for scheduling new appointments, Othena.com, was being updated regularly to address technical issues, said Jessica Good, manager of public information for the county health department.
More than 256,000 people registered through the site by Saturday – an average of 12,000 records per hour – and more than 30,000 of them have been vaccinated, she said. Good added that more consultations would be made available as the county received more vaccine.
Orange County has about 450,000 residents aged 65 and over, in addition to 250,000 health workers and health workers and first responders, but only 170,000 doses have been allocated so far, Good said. Of these, 80% went to hospitals and major health care providers, she said.
In a reminder that a single injection of the vaccine does not confer full immunity, US Representative Lou Correa, who represents the 46th Congressional district covering parts of Orange County, announced on Saturday that he had tested positive for the virus the day before – although he received his first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine on December 19.
“I now join more than 200,000 Orange County residents who have been diagnosed with the virus,” Correa said on Saturday in a statement.