Vaccine eligibility is expected to increase from next week, but availability of appointments will depend on how many doses the county expects to receive – and county officials won’t know that figure until another day.
There will be nearly 400 locations in LA County where the vaccines will be administered. The new people who qualify include food and agricultural workers, teachers and other education and childcare workers, and emergency and first responders.
The expansion comes even as more good news is on the horizon, with Johnson & Johnson saying the new vaccine could be available in a few days.
The FDA says the Johnson & Johnson vaccine meets the requirements for emergency use authorization, and that could be done as early as Friday. The company says it will have 20 million doses available by March and 100 million by the end of June.
The vaccine was 85% effective in preventing serious diseases and the data shows that it works against all variants, even the highly contagious South African variant, although it is less effective.
It only needs one dose and it doesn’t need extreme refrigeration like the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
Dr. Barbara Ferrer, Los Angeles County’s director of public health, said this could provide a nice boost to the county’s vaccination efforts.
“A lot of people will be very happy when we buy Johnson & Johnson,” Ferrer said. Just one dose. That means you come by once for your vaccination and then you’re done.
The county website is not yet accepting appointments for the expanded group next week, until the county knows how many doses it expects to receive.
Once that begins, approximately 25-29% of available appointments are expected to be allocated to teachers and other school personnel. The province is developing a priority-based school district system based on the poverty level and the number of cases of coronavirus in the district’s community.
Latest LA County Numbers
Even as vaccination efforts increase, Los Angeles County continues to report more new cases and deaths than it did before the holiday wave.
The county reported 136 new deaths and 2,157 new cases on Wednesday. The province has now seen a total of 20,987 deaths from COVID-19.
That overall death rate was recently revised upward by 806 deaths after district officials discovered a number of coronavirus-related deaths that were not reported through the normal paperwork process, but were found in a death certificate check. Those 806 deaths occurred during the holiday peak of December 3 to February 3.
Since the start of the pandemic, the province has reported 1,185,457 cases of COVID-19.
Ferrer said last week that the county caused an average of about 72 deaths per day from COVID-19. In comparison, at the beginning of November there were on average about 14 deaths per day.
“While we’ve gotten to the other side of the terrible wave, it’s important to remember that we did this with tremendous grief, illness and death,” Ferrer said.
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