Bay Area desperate for more doses, no wider eligibility

As state and federal authorities expanded vaccine eligibility this week, local health officials in the Bay Area are desperate for more doses to meet demand from those who were already eligible.

Since Contra Costa County began allowing all residents 65 and over to register for immunization appointments – in line with new guidelines issued by U.S. and California health officials – it has received a thousand demands per hour, enough to meet her weekly dose allocation in 12 hours. The website for Sutter Health, a healthcare provider immunizing people in multiple counties, crashed Thursday under such high demand for vaccination surveys. To make matters worse, a federal stockpile of second-dose vaccines that had been factored into planned supplies was in fact depleted, throwing “chaos” into an already difficult deployment, in the words of a Santa County official. Clara.

Contra Costa County has used half of the vaccine doses allocated so far, but it’s not for lack of trying. Around 36,000 photos have been given, and the other 36,000 have already been taken into account with appointments made in the days and weeks to come. 33,000 more are expected to arrive soon.

“The county is not just taking these other 36,000 doses,” COVID-19 chief of operations Dr. Ori Tzvieli said at a press conference on Friday morning. “We are rapidly stepping up our efforts to vaccinate as many people as possible. We want to get gunshots. … But the mitigation step is really how much vaccine we have allowed ourselves.

By the end of next week, the county hopes to administer 3,600 shots per day and increase that capacity to 5,800 per day by next month. In Santa Clara County, officials are increasing the number of vaccinations through the first phase of recipients from around 3,000 given on Monday to 6,000 expected to be given on Friday.

Valley Medical Center deputy chief medical officer Dr Jennifer Tong warned that was only a small part of the need.

“The biggest constraints we are currently facing are vaccine availability,” she said.

To date, the county has administered 32,352 first doses and 6,594 second doses out of some 170,000 total allocated. Two mass vaccination sites at the County Fairgrounds in downtown San Jose and at a Berger Drive complex in North San Jose will soon be joined by a high-capacity site in Mountain View. An offer by the San Francisco 49ers to use Levi’s Stadium as another such venue is still under consideration by the county.

If there were more doses in Contra Costa County each week, Tzvieli would reassess the need for a mass vaccination site. But with the limited amount available, its 20 or so smaller sites across the county are proving more effective, he said. Two more are expected to open in Richmond and Antioch next week.

“It’s all about supply,” Tzvieli said. “If I had 20,000 more doses, I would fix it in a jiffy, but I just don’t have them yet.”

Santa Clara County attorney James Williams said they also continue to struggle over what the vaccination capacity is in the county, in large part because the hospital systems that provide care to the majority of patients of South Bay, Kaiser and the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, are receiving the vaccine. doses directly from the state. Federal providers, like CVS, Walgreens, and VA, are also out of reach for their data.

“We don’t have full visibility into what they’re doing,” Williams said.

Williams pointed out that expanding state vaccine eligibility to residents 65 and older does nothing to increase the supply of available vaccines, which is why the county instituted its own age threshold. 75 years old. At least 300,000 residents of Santa Clara County are at least 65 years old.

“The reality is that we absolutely don’t have this amount of vaccine to administer,” he said. “We’re seeing demand outstripping supply and outstripping base capacity for things like planning.”

Contra Costa County officials said they hoped to vaccinate the 77,000 residents aged 75 and over “in the coming weeks” but have meanwhile opened appointments for anyone 65 and over. For now, however, most daytime injections are still for frontline healthcare workers and people over 75.

Williams also said officials were disheartened by the revelation on Friday that an alleged stockpile of second doses did not exist.

“We learned this morning that no such stock exists,” he said. “This throws the expectations for vaccine delivery into chaos.”

He hopes the promise of a truly nationally coordinated vaccine rollout promised by the new Biden administration will reverse what he calls an abdication of the Trump administration, which he says has devoted resources to a futile attempt to overturn Biden’s election in the face of a pandemic. whose death toll is approaching 400,000 in the United States.