[ad_1]
The Santa Clara County public health system is on track to vaccinate 30,000 residents per week, officials said on Friday.
The Santa Clara Valley Medical Center has established five vaccination sites, including mass vaccination sites at Berger Drive and Santa Clara County Fairgrounds.
The Berger site has the capacity to vaccinate 1,300 people and the exhibition center can vaccinate 1,800 people per day.
Next week, another vaccination site will open in Mountain View, and the county plans to open a third mass vaccination site with more capacity than the fairgrounds, said Dr Jennifer Tong, deputy chief medical officer of the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center.
“Our system alone vaccinated over 3,000 people this Monday, over 4,000 this week Tuesday and Wednesday, over 5,000 yesterday, and we have over 6,000 appointments scheduled today,” said Tong. “So we are going up very quickly.”
The county health system alone administered 32,352 first doses and 6,594 second doses to eligible healthcare workers and people aged 75 and over in the county as of Thursday.
But the biggest constraint on getting more people immunized is the vaccine supply.
“We really need a stable and predictable supply so that we can predict our capacity and increase our capacity in the future,” Tong said.
County legal counsel James Williams said the fault lay with the federal government, the daily changes in federal and state guidelines and, subsequently, a lot of misinformation.
“We learned a few days ago, for example, that the federal government was going to release stocks of vaccines that were being held for a second dose,” Williams said. “We learned this morning that no such stock exists.”
The other big problem is that vaccine distribution is fragmented, with no real organized plan across the county, Williams said.
Large multi-county health care systems like Kaiser Permanente receive their vaccine allocations from the state – which Williams says is the “crux of the challenge” as the majority of the population is insured by these large health systems. .
Federal agencies also govern themselves in vaccine distribution, and a federal program with Walgreens and CVS directs vaccine distribution to residents and staff of long-term care facilities.
A January 7 public health ordinance aims to address this issue by requiring hospitals, clinics and all vaccine administrators to share information with the county and submit a vaccination plan by February 1.
But there is little the health ordinance can do because federal programs and agencies are not required to share information with the county, Williams said.
However, county officials like Supervisor Otto Lee are hopeful that a new administration will improve vaccination.
“New President-elect Biden has spoken of 100 million vaccines in the first 100 days of his tenure,” Lee said. “And we’ll hold him accountable to make sure that happens.”
In the meantime, as the county faces its biggest increase to date, authorities are imploring residents to follow health orders, stay home as much as possible and avoid gatherings.
“We’re finally feeling the impact of Thanksgiving and Christmas get-togethers,” Lee said. “That number won’t go down unless we all work so hard together to stay socially aloof, wear masks, and unless absolutely necessary, please don’t go out and get together.”
For more information on vaccination in Santa Clara County, visit sccfreevax.org.
[ad_2]
Source link