[ad_1]
Four in five eligible Angelenos could be vaccinated against COVID-19 by the end of June, assuming enough doses are circulating in Los Angeles County, a senior health official said this week. .
“Reaching such a milestone is possible with increased allocations, and it would drastically change the trajectory of the pandemic here in LA County,” Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said in a briefing Wednesday.
And project supplies will increase dramatically over the next month.
This week, the total number of doses entering LA – a pipeline that includes direct allocations to pharmacies, health clinics, and federally run sites – is around 500,000. As of the end of April , said Ferrer, the hope is that the weekly transport will be around 700,000 doses.
“If LA County receives an average of 576,000 doses per week starting in April, we can expect to achieve 80% immunization coverage for people 16 years and older in just another 12 weeks,” he said. she declared.
As of Saturday, more than 4 million doses of the vaccine had been administered across the county – including 1.3 million second doses.
Two of the currently available vaccines, one from Pfizer-BioNTech and the other from Moderna, require two doses given weeks apart. A third vaccine, from Johnson & Johnson, has only one vaccine.
Deployment of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been slowed by production issues, and the company said Wednesday evening that a batch of the vaccine did not meet quality standards and could not be used.
The drugmaker did not say how many doses were lost, and it was not clear how the issue would impact future shipments.
It is also unclear at this point how, or if, the issue will interfere with the LA County timeline.
“We rely so much on increasing production and like everything in life there can be unforeseen problems and challenges and we will have to adapt to that,” Ferrer said.
She said that in LA County, officials “predicted that about 20% of our doses over the next three months would be Johnson & Johnson doses, but we actually made projections to bring that number down to 10. % ”.
“So we’ll be back, we’ll take a look at our numbers,” she said.
Starting Thursday, California opens the vaccine queue for all ages 50 to 64. Seniors were already eligible.
LA County health officials estimate that around 631,000 residents in the newly eligible age group have already received at least one dose of the vaccine – either because of the field they work in or because they have an eligible health problem. But that still leaves 1.4 million individuals of the same age who have yet to begin their inoculation regimen.
On April 15, Californians between the ages of 16 and 49 will also be able to roll up their sleeves. In LA County, nearly 3.9 million people in this age group have yet to be vaccinated.
Given the glut of people who still need their vaccines, Ferrer preached patience – arguing that “our promise is to just continue to distribute the vaccine as quickly as we provide it to everyone who is eligible.”
“One of the sorrows people expressed to us was simply not knowing ‘when it will be my turn and how long I will have to wait’,” she said. “I think we all have a pretty good feeling now that over the next two to three months we’re going to be able to get everyone in LA County vaccinated.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
[ad_2]
Source link