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Scripps Health joined a few San Diego County health systems on Tuesday that began administering the COVID-19 vaccine to residents 65 and older.
When California opened up vaccines beyond the Phase 1A group – critical healthcare workers, nursing home workers, and their patients – to include anyone 65 and older, county public health officials San Diego quickly admitted they didn’t have enough vaccines for The Expansion yet.
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But health systems that have extra doses of the vaccine are able to keep up with their own pace, the county said. Scripps Health said on Tuesday they were one of them.
Scripps Health will begin administering the COVID-19 vaccine from Wednesday to patients 65 and older by appointment. Dr Ghazala Sharieff, chief medical officer for acute care, said hours after the announcement, they already had 6,800 patients scheduled for appointments.
Patients will be notified via the MyScripps portal if they are eligible for the vaccine. Appointments will be offered on a first come, first served basis from there at some clinics.
“Patients unable to get an appointment for a vaccine during these clinics will be notified when additional appointments become available,” the health group said. “Scripps patients are urged not to call their doctors’ offices as they cannot schedule these vaccines.”
The health group said the doses that will be used on patients 65 and older were leftovers from their efforts to vaccinate their health workers – around 1,000 in all.
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No additional doses have yet been provided by the federal or local government for the 65 and over group. Sharieff said that by scheduling so many dates, they were taking “a bit of a leap of faith” that the doses were coming from their government partnerships.
While Sharieff acknowledges that 6,800 patients is a large number, there are still tens of thousands of patients in their system still anxiously awaiting the vaccine.
“I can’t have everyone right away but it’s a start, so I just want to ask for a little patience,” Sharieff said. “It is exciting that we are rolling this out as quickly as possible. As soon as we receive more vaccines, we will open our clinics.”
UC San Diego Health is, as of Tuesday, the only other health system capable of facilitating vaccinations for the 65 and over group. They hoped to vaccinate about 500 patients per day at their facilities “in addition to the nearly 10,000 UC San Diego Health workers who have already received their first doses in Phase 1A.”
The health system prioritized people with co-morbidities and those at severe risk of COVID-19 infection, and contacted these patients directly.
Kaiser Permanente, on the other hand, was still only vaccinating healthcare workers and senior healthcare workers and their patients due to their limited vaccine supply.
“The recent extension of eligibility by the state to include people over 65 has called into question the entire healthcare system, including Kaiser Permanente,” a spokesperson for Kaiser said in a statement. at NBC 7.
The hospital says they received an average of 40,000 single doses of the vaccine per week for their entire statewide system, which is still only enough to accommodate the Phase 1A group.
The San Diego County public health system was taking steps to immunize the area’s senior population, but was still unable to open immunization to all people 65 and older. On Monday, officials announced they would open their vaccination sites to people aged 75 and over, creating a mess of confusion in the large “Vaccination Super Center” in Petco Park.
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Officials said the move was prompted by a slowdown in COVID-19 vaccination sites as well as efforts to vaccinate those most at risk of complications from the coronavirus. San Diegans who are in the eligible group and cannot receive appointments through their healthcare provider can create appointments here.
San Diego County said more doses would become available next month as vaccinations extend to more than 600,000 people in the Phase 1B group.
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