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By 
Spencer Custodio |
Orange County seniors 65 and older can now get the coronavirus vaccine after county public health officials pushed the vulnerable group into priority levels.
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Dr Clayton Chau, county public health official and director of the OC Healthcare Agency, said an emergency vaccine task force meeting was held on Sunday evening.
“Almost all of them signed this appeal on Sunday night,” Chau said during the county supervisors’ public virus update on Tuesday. “We are going to start vaccinating people aged 65 and over in Orange County, adding them to level 1a.”
Healthcare workers and first responders are also listed in this level.
The new push for the elderly follows widespread criticism of slow vaccinations, not just in OC, but statewide.
After seeing a slow rollout, public health officials called local health departments up and down the state, warning them to increase vaccination efforts or risk losing some of their doses.
“The state was in a state of panic,” Chau said.
Chau said Orange County supervisors had received extra doses from other counties “which cannot do it fast enough.”
“So we were allocated 170,000 doses. We didn’t leave anything, ”Chau said. “Because we didn’t leave anything to the state, the state this morning just gave us 6,000 extra doses.”
The renewed vaccination efforts also follow concerns from local doctors, dentists, nurses, medical aid and other non-hospital health workers.
Hospital staff were the first to begin the two-part vaccination process last month, when OC received the vaccines.
Chau said the elderly should contact their primary care doctors to help them arrange appointments to start vaccinations.
“We have a drugstore salesperson who works with us, free of charge,” Chau said.
According to a press release issued late last year, hundreds of elderly care facilities are expected to be vaccinated.
“The program will allow counties to leverage staff from CVS and Walgreens Pharmacy to deliver the vaccine more widely, with pharmacy staff going directly to health facilities. Qualified nursing facilities will receive the vaccine from CVS and Walgreens staff. Approximately 72 skilled nursing facilities and 900 senior care facilities will receive vaccines through CVS and Walgreens across Orange County, ”the statement said.
Chau said county officials are also looking to set up smaller vaccination sites for the vulnerable population who should not be surrounded by large crowds.
The efforts to vaccinate the elderly come after dozens of elderly readers raised concerns about getting their first doses by email to Voice of OC.
Meanwhile, medical staff are being vaccinated at three sites across the county, including the Orange County Fire Authority headquarters in Irvine.
Eligible workers – doctors, nurses and medical assistants – must Register an appointment hour in advance, there is no appointment.
The sites are estimated to vaccinate between 800 and 1,000 people per day, according to county health care agency officials in an email Tuesday.
Since Tuesday afternoon, no appointment was available.
“Please check back regularly,” the website said.
Disneyland is slated to become the first of five vaccination supersites.
Last week, Huntington Beach City Manager Oliver Chi told Voice of OC the other big vaccination sites will be at Knott’s Berry Farm, Orange County Fairgrounds, Great Park and Soka University.
Chau said that “according to rumor” the federal government should send more vaccines to California.
But at a press conference on Tuesday, Secretary of the State Agency for Health and Human Services Dr Mark Ghaly did not give details on when more vaccines will hit the state. .
Ghaly said they would announce the “prospect of getting additional vaccines in the coming days.”
The state has set a target of 1 million new vaccinations by the end of the week.
Orange County public health officials have set a collective immunity target for July 4 – meaning 70%, or more than 2.2 million people, will need to be vaccinated by then to reach this goal.
Chau said the big five vaccination sites need to administer around 8,000 doses per day if the OC is to meet the July 4 target.
There is still no deadline for opening large sites.
“We are going to deploy it depending on how much vaccine we can introduce into Orange County. So we’re not going to open them all if the vaccine isn’t available, ”Chau said.
As authorities wrangle over vaccines, hospitalizations in the county have declined slightly.
2,200 people were hospitalized on Tuesday, including 535 in intensive care units, according to the county health agency.
“Currently its the highest number of people in the hospital compared to our summer surge,” Chau said at Tuesday’s supervisors meeting.
Hospitalization trends appear to be stabilizing somewhat this week, after daily figures have maintained records for at least one consecutive month.
But deaths have increased.
The virus has now killed 2,148 people out of 195,685 confirmed cases, including 28 new deaths reported on Tuesday.
Recently reported deaths can go back several weeks due to reporting delays.
In the past week, 222 new deaths have been reported.
OC also saw 3,824 new cases reported on Tuesday.
The county has averaged more than 3,300 new cases per day since last week.
State public health officials estimate that about 12% of all newly infected people end up being hospitalized within three weeks.
That means there could be more than 2,700 more people hospitalized in the coming weeks, as hospitals release stabilized patients as quickly as possible.
The virus has already killed more than three times as many people as the flu on an annual average.
For the background, Orange County has recorded an average of around 20,000 deaths per year since 2016, including 543 annual flu deaths, according to health data status.
According to state mortality statistics, cancer kills more than 4,600 people, heart disease kills more than 2,800, more than 1,400 die of Alzheimer’s disease, and strokes kill more than 1,300 people.
Orange County has already surpassed its annual average of 20,000 deaths, with 21,110 people dying in November, according to the latest available status data.
It is a difficult virus for the medical community to fight off, as some people have no symptoms, but can still spread it. Others have mild symptoms, such as fatigue and a slight fever.
Others end up in intensive care units for days and weeks before recovering, while others end up dying from the virus.
Ghaly said early data indicates the dreaded holiday wave is not as bad as officials initially thought, but said it was still too early to say whether cases resulting from the holiday season would create another peak at the top of a peak.
“We still expect there to be a hike in the middle of the month.”
Here are the latest figures on viruses in Orange County from county data:
Infections | Hospitalizations and Deaths | City by city data | Demography
Spencer Custodio is a Voice of OC reporter. You can reach him at [email protected] Follow him on twitter @SpencerCustodio
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