With state and federal officials expanding vaccine eligibility this week, confused local health officials in the Bay Area are desperate for more doses to meet the demand of those already eligible.
Since Contra Costa County allowed all residents 65 and older to sign up for vaccination appointments – in accordance with new guidelines released by the U.S. and California health authorities – it has received a thousand requests per hour, enough to meet the weekly allocation of doses in 12 hours. The website of Sutter Health, a health care provider who vaccinates people in multiple provinces, crashed Thursday under such a high demand of vaccination requests. To make matters worse, a federal supply of second-dose vaccines contained in expected supplies had actually been depleted, causing “ chaos ” in an already difficult rollout, in the words of an official in Santa Clara County.
Contra Costa County has used half of the vaccine doses assigned to date, but that’s not because of a lack of attempts. About 36,000 shots have been given and the remaining 36,000 have already been accounted for with appointments to be booked in the coming days and weeks. Another 33,000 will arrive soon.
“The province is not just on those other 36,000 doses,” said COVID-19 Chief Operating Officer Dr. Ori Tzvieli at a press conference Friday morning. “We are rapidly stepping up our efforts to vaccinate as many people as possible. We want to be armed. … But the mitigating step is actually how much vaccine we are assigned to ourselves. “
By the end of next week, the province hopes to be able to deliver 3,600 shots per day and scale that capacity to 5,800 per day by next month. In Santa Clara County, officials are ramping up the number of vaccinations to the first stage of recipients, from about 3,000 given on Monday to 6,000 expected to be given on Friday.
Dr. Jennifer Tong, Valley Medical Center’s associate chief medical officer, warned this is only a small fraction of the need.
“The biggest limitation we are currently facing is the availability of the vaccine,” she said.
So far, the province has administered 32,352 first doses and 6,594 second doses out of a total of approximately 170,000. Two massive vaccination sites on the county’s fairgrounds, in downtown San Jose, and in a complex on Berger Drive in North San Jose will soon be joined by a large-capacity site in Mountain View. An offer from the San Francisco 49ers to use Levi’s Stadium as another such site is still under investigation by the county.
If more doses of Contra Costa County came in every week, Tzvieli would re-evaluate the need for a mass vaccination site. But with the limited amount available, the province’s 20 or so smaller sites are proving to be more effective, he said. Two more will open next week in Richmond and Antioch.
“It’s all about the offer,” said Tzvieli. “If I had 20,000 extra doses, I would arrange that in an instant, but I just don’t have them right now.”
Santa Clara County Counsel James Williams said they also continue to struggle to know how much vaccine capacity there is in the county, largely because the hospital systems that provide care to a majority of South Bay patients, Kaiser and the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, have a vaccine to get. doses direct from the state. Federal providers, such as CVS, Walgreens, and the VA, are also outside their data range.
“We don’t have a full view of what they are doing,” said Williams.
Williams stressed that expanding the number of vaccines eligible for residents 65 and older does nothing to increase the available vaccine supply, which is why the county has set its own age limit of 75. At least 300,000 Santa Clara County residents are at least 65 years old. old.
“The reality is, we can’t deliver nearly that amount of vaccine,” he said. “We see demand outstripping supply and outstripping basic capacity for things like planning.”
Officials in Contra Costa County said they hope to vaccinate all 77,000 of their residents who are 75 and older “ in the coming weeks, ” but in the meantime, they have opened appointments for everyone 65 and older. But for now, most admissions on any given day still go to primary care health workers and people over the age of 75.
Williams also said officials were discouraged by Friday’s revelation that an alleged supply of second doses did not exist.
“We learned this morning that no such stock exists,” he said. “This throws chaos in the expectations surrounding vaccine delivery.”
He hopes the promise of a truly nationally coordinated vaccine rollout promised by the incoming Biden administration will reverse what he calls a abdication by the Trump administration, which he says has spent resources on a futile attempt to overturn Biden’s election. in the face of a pandemic whose death toll in the United States is nearing 400,000.
“That really took the energy of the federal government away from its very first job of protecting and caring for everyone in the United States,” Williams said.
But the new administration will face a one-generation challenge in the coming months to inoculate hundreds of millions of Americans with vaccines that are difficult to administer. Even beyond the extreme storage and transportation requirements, healthcare providers must be trained in how to deliver the recording. Subsequently, additional personnel are required to monitor the recipients for the next 15 minutes in case of allergic reactions. All of this must be achieved in a safe, socially detached way.
“To top it all off,” said Tzvieli, “all of this is being built as we face the biggest boom in the pandemic, already stretching our limited resources.”