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Professional Bay Area sports franchises are eager to see their stadiums turn into mass COVID-19 vaccination sites, but neither the team nor local officials seem to know if and when that will happen.
Spokesmen for the San Francisco Giants, Oakland A, San Jose Sharks and San Jose Earthquakes have all confirmed their organizations have been in contact with government officials and local health care providers. on the use of stadiums as vaccination centers. San Francisco 49ers CEO Al Guido even took to social media to offer Levi’s Stadium so residents of Santa Clara County can get their shots.
At a press conference Wednesday, Santa Clara County attorney James Williams said the county still had not received enough vaccines to immunize all local health workers.
“We don’t know how many vaccines will be arriving in the county,” Williams said. “And that’s really a challenge.”
San Diego’s Petco Park this week became a “vaccination superstation,” opening its doors for 5,000 people to receive vaccines per day. The parking lot at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, the largest coronavirus testing site in the United States, will turn into a vaccination center where 12,000 people can be vaccinated each day by the end of this week.
In the Bay Area, the vaccine distribution process presented a variety of challenges leading to widespread frustration.
Santa Clara County Director Dr Jeff Smith told the supervisory board on Tuesday that the county recently requested 100,000 additional doses of COVID-19 vaccine from the state. Demand has been met with the assurance that only 6,000 vaccines are on the way.
“Once we get to Jan. 18, and then every week we’ll be able to deliver 35,000 doses with a huge caveat,” Smith told the board. “Right now, we don’t have enough freezers in our freezers to last a week, let alone be able to do 35,000 a week.”
San Francisco Director of Public Health Dr Grant Colfax said opening a mass vaccination site was also a consideration, but like Santa Clara County, San Francisco lacks sufficient doses.
“When we have a sufficient supply of vaccine to meet the need for a mass vaccination site, we expect that site to be operational,” Colfax said Tuesday. “Our goal is to open these sites as quickly as possible when the state provides us with more vaccines. We really need to get more doses and go through the phases of the states levels. ”
One of the biggest hurdles county authorities have faced in the first month of COVID-19 vaccine distribution is tracking the number of people who have received them. The federal government has allocated vaccines directly to state health departments, companies like CVS and Walgreens for delivery in long-term care facilities, as well as veterans hospitals and Indian health centers. State officials have provided huge quantities of vaccines directly to private health care providers in several counties such as Kaiser Permanente, Palo Alto Medical Foundation and Sutter Health, as well as to county health departments for hospitals private public and local like Stanford.
The California Department of Public Health has tracked the number of vaccines distributed (about 2.5 million) and the number of people who received them (889,000). But to date, the state has not created an easily accessible public dashboard with detailed immunization data.
In Santa Clara County, a health decree implemented last week now requires vaccine suppliers to report daily data that includes number of vaccines that have been administered, appointments available per day, vaccines not used , clinical sites and information on who vaccinated. In San Francisco, District 6 Supervisor Matt Haney is advocating for a similar level of transparency.
“There is a lot of inequality in vaccine distribution and access to information about how many vaccines we have and will receive,” Haney said. “Some counties get more doses of the vaccine than San Francisco. Much of the vaccine doses go to entities in several counties, most of which are private providers. That said, counties may request more doses and should expect to receive tens of thousands of additional doses in the coming weeks.
With nearly two-thirds of vaccines distributed statewide that have yet to be used, California lags far behind other states in its vaccination rate. The lack of transparent data has created a huge problem because local health departments responsible for educating the public about the immunization process do not know how many doses private providers have yet to dispense.
Some issues may be fixed soon, as officials in San Francisco and Santa Clara County have expressed optimism that they will receive an influx of doses soon after President Joe Biden is inaugurated, but they also know that the ability to immunize a high percentage of the population will rely on the urgency – and the willingness to cooperate – of private providers.
“We know other providers in the county like Stanford and Kaiser are working to expand their own sites, including mass vaccination sites,” Smith said. “They receive a direct vaccine allocation and represent the majority of the county’s population.”
It is private providers, not county health services, that could be the driving force behind turning stadiums into mass vaccination sites. Counties, including Santa Clara and Alameda, have created online portals that allow people to sign up to be notified when it’s their turn to get the vaccine, but most residents will likely receive their shots from providers. private.
With Governor Gavin Newsom announcing on Wednesday that all Californians aged 65 and over are now eligible for vaccination, private providers face immense pressure to step up their vaccination process and find spaces outside of hospitals and clinics to vaccinate people.
In San Francisco, Haney sees an avenue for collaboration between private providers and the public health department to speed up the immunization process.
“In San Diego, at Petco, they do 5,000 vaccinations a day with thousands of volunteers and a massive public-private partnership to do it and we need it in San Francisco,” Haney said. “It makes good sense to me to use the sites and opportunities we have to distribute this vaccine. The longer it takes to vaccinate everyone, the longer this pandemic will last. ”
Smith told the watchdog that the Santa Clara County Public Health Department is currently looking for a mass covered site with a large parking lot where 10,000 to 20,000 vaccines can be administered daily, but that a site has not been finalized.
Although the SAP Center, home of the San Jose Sharks, is an obvious choice in Santa Clara County due to its size and the site’s recent use as a COVID-19 testing center, no local or local officials. team did not provide any indication that the Bay Area stadiums, with one exception, will soon open a vaccination site.
That exception appears to be the Oakland Coliseum, as the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Authority is reviewing a turnkey plan on Friday that could allow healthcare providers to turn the stadium’s vast parking lots into a mass vaccination site. shortly after receiving approval.
Until vaccine data provided by public and private providers is made available in a centralized location, and counties receive clarity on the number of doses available in their jurisdiction, it appears that the process of vaccinating most Bay Area residents will remain a maddening job.
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