As state and federal officials expanded their vaccine admissions this week, local health officials in the Bay Area are desperate for more doses to meet the demand of those already eligible.
Since the contra-province began allowing all residents aged 65 and over to report for vaccinations – in line with new guidelines issued by the U.S. and California health authorities – it has received thousands of requests per hour, enough to comply with the weekly allotment of doses in 12 hours. The website of Sutter Health, a healthcare provider that vaccinates people in various provinces, crashed on Thursday amid such a huge demand of vaccination inquiries. To make matters worse, a federal stockpile of two-dose vaccines processed into the expected stock was actually depleted, throwing chaos into an already rocky rollout, according to one Santa Clara County official.
Contra Costa County uses half of the doses given so far, but it is not a lack of trying. About 36,000 shots were given, and the other 36,000 are already being discussed in the coming days and weeks. Another 33,000 are due to arrive soon.
“The province is not just sitting on the other 36,000 doses,” said Dr. Ori Tzvieli, chief operating officer of COVID-19, said at a news conference on Friday morning. “We are working fast to vaccinate as many people as possible. We want to get shots in the arms. … But the mitigating step is really how much vaccine we are given to us. ”
By the end of next week, the province hopes to deliver 3600 shots per day and scale the capacity up to 5800 per day by next month. In Santa Clara County, officials are increasing the number of vaccinations after the first phase of recipients, from about 3,000 given Monday to 6,000 expected to be administered Friday.
Dr. Jennifer Tong, co-principal of Valley Medical Center, warned that this is just a tiny bit of the need.
“The biggest constraints we are currently facing are the availability of the vaccine,” she said.
To date, the province has administered 32,352 first doses and 6,594 second doses out of approximately 170,000 total allocations. Two mass vaccination sites at the fair in the district, in central San Jose, and at a complex in Berger Drive in northern San Jose, will soon be accompanied by a large site in Mountain View. An offer by the San Francisco 49ers to use Levi’s Stadium as another such site is still being considered by the country.
As more doses arrive in Contra Costa County each week, Tzvieli will reevaluate the need for a mass vaccination site. But with the limited amount available, the twenty smaller sites in the country are more effective, he said. Two more will open next week in Richmond and Antioch.
“It’s all about the offer,” Tzvieli said. “If I had 20,000 extra doses, I would arrange it in no time, but I just do not have it now.”
Santa Clara County Councilman James Williams said they are also still struggling to know how much vaccination there is in the country, mainly because the hospital systems that care for a majority of South Bay patients, Kaiser and the Palo Alto Medical Foundation vaccine received. doses directly from the state. Federal providers, such as CVS, Walgreens and the VA, have also been reached beyond their data.
“We do not have the full insight into what they do,” Williams said.
Williams stressed that the state’s expansion of the vaccine for residents 65 and older is doing nothing to increase the available vaccine supply, and therefore the country has set its own age threshold of 75. At least 300,000 Santa Clara County residents are at least 65 years old.
“The reality is that we can deliver nowhere near the amount of vaccine,” he said. “We see that demand is greater than supply and exceeds the basic capacity for things like scheduling.”
Contra provincial officials said they hope to vaccinate all 77,000 residents aged 75 and over in the next few weeks, but have meanwhile opened appointments for everyone aged 65 and older. For now, however, most shots on a given day still go to frontline health workers and those over 75.
Williams also said officials were revealed Friday that a suspected stock of second doses did not exist.
“We learned this morning that no such stock exists,” he said. “It confuses the expectations surrounding the delivery of vaccines in chaos.”
He hopes the promise of a truly nationally-coordinated vaccination by the incoming Biden administration will reverse what he calls an abdication of the Trump administration, which he says has devoted resources to a futile bid for the Biden election. overthrow in the face of a pandemic. whose death toll in the United States is approaching 400,000.
“It really diverted the energy of the federal government from its initial task of protecting and caring for everyone in the United States,” Williams said.
But the new government will face a one-time challenge to vaccinate hundreds of millions of Americans in the coming months with vaccinations that are barely simple to administer. In addition to the extreme requirements for storage and transportation, health workers must be trained in the delivery of the shot, and additional personnel will be required to monitor the recipients during the next 15 minutes in case of allergic reactions. All this must be done at a safe, social distance.
“To limit it,” Tzvieli said, “it’s all being built while we face the greatest upsurge of the pandemic, which is already expanding our limited resources.”