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Kaiser Permanente has given more coronavirus vaccines to residents of Sonoma County than any other single vendor, according to new data released by the county this week that provides unprecedented details of the 2-month campaign to inoculate residents of the county against the deadly virus.
As of Wednesday, 76,936 doses of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccine were given to residents of Sonoma County, the equivalent of a dose going to 15.4% of the total population. The county and its partners have delivered the vaccine to more of its residents than nine other more similarly-sized California counties, county vaccine chief Dr Urmila Shende noted Wednesday evening.
“So compared to a lot of different counties in California, we’re doing very, very well,” Shende said. “It’s a bumpy road, it doesn’t feel like that every day. But we are making progress and administering doses faster than other countries our size. “
However, most of the border counties continue to overtake Sonoma County to vaccinate their populations. Napa (19.0%), Marin (18.2%) and Mendocino (17.1%) all administered more doses per capita. Lake County (12.3%) delivered less.
Overall, Sonoma County has the 12th highest vaccination rate among the state’s 58 counties, according to data compiled by the State Department of Public Health.
Data reveals new insights into the vaccination campaign, which began on December 14 among frontline health workers and emergency personnel, then extended on January 27 to people over the age of 75 . with people aged 70 to 74.
Just over one in 10 people who have received the vaccine have been vaccinated outside Sonoma County, many of them from health workers who travel to work in neighboring counties.
How vaccine distribution varies by provider
Kaiser, the county’s largest health care provider, has administered more vaccines than any other entity, with nearly 17,000 shots to date. Second, a consortium of companies that have partnered to manage sites launched by the county – including the Sonoma County Medical Association, DEMA Consulting, and OptumServe, among others. Together, they administered just over 12,000 doses.
The next largest vaccine administrators were Sutter Health (approximately 10,050 doses), out-of-county suppliers (nearly 8,000), CVS Pharmacy (over 5,000), Safeway (nearly 4,000) and St Joseph Health, which operates Santa Rosa Memorial and Petaluma Valley Hospitals (approximately 3000).
Judging by the data, not all go through their vaccine vials at the same rate.
Of the six hospitals in Sonoma County, Kaiser Santa Rosa administered about 95% of the doses received, Petaluma Valley Hospital 84% and Sonoma Valley Hospital 59%. The Santa Rosa Memorial, the county’s largest hospital, administered just 55 percent of the doses it was receiving. Sutter Santa Rosa did not provide a figure for doses received, and the Healdsburg District Hospital line showed more doses entering the arms (1094) than the facility (980), others indications of the uneven nature of current immunization data.
Healdsburg Hospital may have been able to extract additional doses from its vials, which is possible with the right type of needle, said Kate Pack, the county’s senior epidemiologist. Other discrepancies in the data may stem from confusion over what the county is asking healthcare providers to list, she said.
St. Joseph Health, the parent company of Memorial Hospital, did not respond to a request for comment on the utilization rate of its Santa Rosa hospital.
The challenge for Sutter Health to keep track of its allocation is that as a multi-account entity, it often shares available doses between its campuses based on daily demand, said Erin Neal, the provider’s administrative director in the Bay Area. .
“The allowance comes from the state system,” Neal explained. “We get a certain amount for Sutter, and as we set up our appointments and our immunization clinics, it is then allocated to us, in Sonoma County. So I apologize for not having a simple answer to this question. But we advocate every week as much as we can based on our population.
It is not known why Kaiser and St. Joseph were able to overcome similar relationship challenges.
Who gets vaccines first
In addition to charts on the distribution of providers, the county also shared data on demographics and geographic disbursement of immunizations.
Latino residents have only received 11% of doses so far, despite making up 27.3% of the population. Meanwhile, around 61.5% of all doses went to women, compared to 38.5% to men. The numbers reflect the top priority of the vaccination effort, which has focused on frontline healthcare workers, Pack said.
The breakdown of vaccinations by postal codes of residents showed a great disparity. The postal code with the highest percentage of residents vaccinated was 95444 in Graton, at 26%. The lowest was 95412 in Annapolis, at around 4%.
The numbers provided on Wednesday are the most relevant as they relate to Sonoma County’s descent through the various phases and levels of California’s vaccination priority system. Officials said the county had now vaccinated around 45% of people 75 and older, a proportion they considered large enough to trigger a shift in the 70 to 74-year-old population this week.
People aged 65 to 69, who make up nearly 7% of the county’s population with around 34,000, anxiously await their turn. This will not happen until the many vaccine suppliers, large and small, find their way into the older subassemblies.
“I wish we could give you a specific date for those 65 and over, but it depends on our overall level of supply and how quickly we can continue to vaccinate,” Shende said.
You can contact editor Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or [email protected]. On Twitter @Skinny_Post.
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