[ad_1]
[Read about the future of the coronavirus, which scientists predict will become a common childhood cold.]
About 11.1 million people in the United States had received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine as of Thursday, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – a number well below the 20 million the Trump administration was hoping for. reach by December 31. Most have only received the first of two doses needed so far, but as of Tuesday, at least 541,000 have received both doses, according to a New York Times survey of all 50 states.
California, with its decentralized public health system, is a microcosm of the many problems plaguing the national immunization effort. The state relies on county health departments to administer vaccines, and Dr David Lubarsky, general manager of UC Davis Health, said the counties were facing the same problem they were having trying to scale up. Covid tests: too little manpower.
Dr Lubarsky suggested the state should hand over more doses of the vaccine to healthcare providers, who already have the ability to selectively reach patients. “Almost everyone has a doctor,” he said, including harder-to-reach patients like those on low income or those without papers. “We know who is at risk,” he said.
Jonah Frohlich, San Francisco-based healthcare consultant at Manatt Health Strategies, said a combination of factors left the county’s public health departments scrambling to cope with a deluge of monumental tasks.
[Find all of The Times’s vaccine coverage here.]
“The same institutions that try to handle testing, contact tracing and person support,” Frohlich said, “are the same people who handle vaccine distribution.
Worse, he said, they have to work with often outdated and overwhelmed information systems, and organize everything on the fly.
[ad_2]
Source link