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In a short time, the Mountain View community center has grown from a recreation space to a mass vaccination center, with the goal of delivering the COVID-19 vaccine to 1,000 people every day.
The vaccination center at 201 S. Rengstorff Ave. is Santa Clara County’s latest effort to expand vaccine access, and the first located in Northern County. Health officials say the site is open from Friday and is the third community vaccination site hastily set up by the county in recent weeks.
To date, the Santa Clara County health system has administered nearly 60,000 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine to residents of the county, making it by far the largest vaccine supplier in the region. Behind, Stanford Health Care with 32,720 and Kaiser Permanente with 17,648.
Vaccine distribution has mainly taken place in acute care hospitals and county-run clinics, making the town’s community center an early outpost for convenient access outside of a clinical setting. It took a lot of work in a short time to reconfigure the space into a vaccination center, said Mountain View Mayor Ellen Kamei, building on a close partnership between Mountain View and the county.
“Through this collaborative effort, we are making it more convenient for residents of Mountain View, and others who live and work nearby in North County, to get vaccinated against this highly contagious virus,” Kamei said during of a press conference on Friday.
The center will be subject to the county’s vaccine eligibility criteria, which are still quite strict and exclude most people with private insurance. County officials have repeatedly said that people who receive care through Kaiser or Sutter Health must apply for a vaccine through their own health care provider and will likely be turned away in county-run vaccination sites. Stanford patients, on the other hand, are encouraged to get vaccinated through their own providers, but will not be turned away from county sites, according to county supervisor Joe Simitian.
The county and most health insurers currently provide vaccines to frontline healthcare workers and all residents over the age of 75. In the case of Stanford patients, residents 65 years of age and older are eligible.
Future vaccine supplies are unpredictable and provided by the state on a weekly basis, making it difficult to plan ahead or accommodate large numbers of new vaccine requests, said Dr Jennifer Tong, Santa Clara Valley Deputy Chief Medical Officer. Medical Center. The last allocation for Santa Clara County was 20,000 doses, she said, which is much smaller than expected.
In addition, separate allowances are given to private health care providers like Kaiser and Sutter to serve their own patients, making it impossible for the county to serve all patients with private insurance.
So who can really benefit from the new vaccination site in Mountain View? With the estimated 300,000 people who are patients of the county health system, all uninsured residents will be eligible, including service sector workers who cannot afford health insurance and those who choose not to. not be insured, according to Simitian.
The county’s original COVID-19 vaccine distribution plan, which was sent to the state last month, did not explicitly call for a site in North County, instead naming the nine health clinics run by the county as “distribution points”. Simitian sharply criticized the wording and expressed concern that residents of North County might not have a local place to receive the vaccine. None of the county health clinics are located in North County.
Simitian, who represents several towns in North County and West Valley, said his district has 40,000 low-income residents on Medi-Cal and the highest proportion of seniors in any district in the county, and pointed out. importance of a close and convenient place to receive the vaccine. He praised Mountain View’s caring community and its “can-do” spirit in meeting this public health need.
“We needed a place in North County to serve the people who are in our area,” Simitian said. “It is very gratifying to know that we are operational and that in a short time we will be at 1,000 vaccinations on this site.”
Anyone wishing to make an appointment for the COVID-19 vaccine is encouraged to visit sccfreevax.org, a county-run portal with links to several healthcare providers.
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