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As the numbers climb, governors are now taking new steps to arm distributed vaccines faster: including mobilizing members of the National Guard and training more volunteers to administer the vaccines.
This means that only about 28% of the doses dispensed were administered.
Here’s how states are boosting immunization efforts
“Everyone is scrambling to get as many vaccinators as possible, while every staff member is needed to help with the outbreak,” Los Angeles County Director of Public Health Barbara Ferrer said Tuesday.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has vowed “aggressive action” to speed up the process, including granting a waiver that will allow dentists to administer the vaccine after training.
Members of the Arizona National Guard, meanwhile, have “conducted refresher training for the first wave of Arizona residents who have volunteers to support vaccination sites statewide.”
Vaccine deployment and administration got off to a “slow start,” Dr Anthony Fauci said, but added that things will likely go faster across the country in the coming months.
“We need to do better at all levels, but I think we’ll pick up the momentum as we pass the holiday season in the first two weeks of January,” Fauci told Newsday’s Randi Marshall on Tuesday.
“We have to be very careful, Randi, not to jump to a conclusion based on a very short period of time because we are just getting started,” Fauci said. “The government and local people, including governors and mayors and others, have just started up in recent weeks in December, right in the middle of the holiday season.”
In one county, more than 1,000 deaths from Covid-19 in a week
“We’re down three times the hospitalizations we saw in November and almost seven times we were in October,” said Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff, chief medical officer of the Ohio Department of Health, Tuesday. “Our intensive care beds are also very busy. In fact, our intensive care units care for over 1,000 patients and over a quarter of our intensive care beds are provided with Covid care.”
“While vaccines are a powerful tool, we don’t need to wait for vaccines to stop new COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths. We can do it now,” said Ferrer, director of county health, in a statement. “Every business and every resident should deliberately follow public health guidelines and safety measures. Please stay home and only leave for essential work or essential services.”
In Georgia, about one in 15 residents has been infected with the virus and more than one in 1,000 has died, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
About 91% of the state’s intensive care beds are occupied and 85% of all inpatient beds are occupied, according to estimates released by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Arizona health officials, meanwhile, reported that only 8% of all intensive care beds were available as of Monday. About 62% of people in the intensive care unit are Covid-19 patients and 57% of ventilators available in the state are in use, according to the state’s Covid-19 dashboard.
CNN’s Cheri Mossburg, Joe Sutton, Sarah Moon, Gisela Crespo, Deidre McPhillips, Maggie Fox, Gregory Lemos and Rebekah Riess contributed to this report.
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