About 6,000 doses of Pfizer vaccine may have been spoiled Wednesday at the Soka University Super POD vaccination site in Aliso Viejo due to a faulty refrigerator.
“It’s in that range,” said Frank Kim, Orange County CEO, of the number of doses that may have gone bad. “We don’t have an exact number yet.” It’s still possible the vaccines could be used, Kim said.
The Pfizer vaccine must be put in a special freezer and then transferred to the refrigerator to start thawing. The next step is to mix it and let it thaw completely at room temperature before inoculations can begin. The vaccine should be used within six hours of thawing to room temperature.
“We are in talks with the manufacturer to see what can be done with the vaccine,” said Kim. Kim stressed that none of the vaccines have been used and other doses have been brought in, so appointments for Wednesday are not affected.
Dodger Stadium appointments go unused because people get confused about first dose appointments. Hetty Chang reported Tuesday, February 9, 2021 on NBC4 News.
The pharmacists who showed up at work on Wednesday at 4:30 am to begin preparing the vaccines found the refrigerator to be faulty, Kim said. Disappointment over the potentially tainted doses aside, the county received good news on Wednesday in an ongoing downward trend in coronavirus cases and hospitalizations.
The Orange County Health Care Agency reported 454 new cases of COVID-19, bringing the cumulative total to 240,220. “It’s all going in the right direction,” Kim said of the case and the hospital admissions. “But I’ll wait a week to see if there are any issues with the Super Bowl … We’ll see what next week looks like.”
Officials are concerned about a bump in business as a result of Super Bowl rallies last Sunday. The province also recorded 35 more fatalities, bringing the death toll to 3,451. The death reports are staggered because they come from different sources and are not always immediately logged.
January was the deadliest month for COVID-19 in Orange County with 893 dead. In December, the death toll was 853. That means that about half of the fatalities in the province since the first death on March 19 occurred in December and January.
The plan to reopen schools is being announced later this week, but some parents are not rushing to send their children back to class. Kim Baldonado reported Tuesday, February 9, 2021 on NBC4 News.
Of the deaths recorded Wednesday, seven were skilled nursing home residents, bringing the total to 879 since the start of the pandemic. Three of them were residents of a residential care center, bringing that total to 380.
The adjusted daily case rate per 100,000 people dropped from 39 last Tuesday to 29.7 this week, and the test positivity rate on a seven-day mean, with a seven-day delay, dropped from 10.9% last week to 9.4%.
The county’s Health Equity Quartile Positivity Rate, which measures cases in hard-hit, more needy parts of the county, dropped from 13.9% to 12.4% last week. The numbers for the state’s color-coded tier framework will be updated on Tuesday.
To transition to the less restrictive red layer of the top purple layer in the state’s coronavirus regulation system, the county must improve to 4 to 7 new daily cases per 100,000 and a 5% to 8% positivity rate with a health quartile at 5 3% to 8%.
The number of coronavirus patients in provincial hospitals dropped from 1,058 on Tuesday to 1,009 on Wednesday, and the number of patients in intensive care dropped from 324 to 310, the OCHCA said.
State-corrected ICU bed availability remains at zero, and the unadjusted figure is up from 10.2% Tuesday to 12.1% Wednesday. The state created the modified statistic to reflect the difference in beds available for COVID-19 patients and non-coronavirus patients.
The OCHCA also reported 19,850 tests on Wednesday, bringing the total to 2,817,697.