Professional sports franchises in the Bay Area are eager to see their stadiums turn into masses of COVID-19 vaccination sites, but the team or local officials do not seem to know if and when this will happen.
Spokesmen for the San Francisco Giants, Oakland A’s, San Jose Sharks and San Jose Earthquakes have all confirmed that their organizations have been in contact with government officials and local health care providers about the use of stadiums as vaccination centers. San Francisco 49ers chief executive Al Guido even used social media to host Levi’s Stadium so Santa Clara County residents could be vaccinated.
Santa Clara County adviser James Williams told a news conference Wednesday that the county has not yet received enough vaccines to vaccinate all local health workers.
“We do not know how much vaccine will come to the country,” Williams said. “And it’s really a challenge.”
Petco Park in San Diego this week became a ‘vaccination station’ that opened its doors so that 5,000 people could receive vaccinations daily. The parking lot of Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, the largest coronavirus test site in the United States, will be converted into a vaccination center where by the end of this week, 12,000 people could be vaccinated every day.
In the Bay Area, the process of distributing vaccines presented a variety of challenges that led to widespread frustration.
Santa Clara County, dr. Jeff Smith told the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday that the country recently requested 100,000 additional doses of COVID-19 vaccines from the state. The request was accepted with the assurance that only 6,000 vaccines were on the way.
“Once we arrive on January 18, we will be able to deliver 35,000 doses weekly with one big warning,” Smith told the board. “At the moment we do not have enough freezers to hold one week, let alone 35,000 a week.”
San Francisco’s director of public health, dr. Grant Colfax, said opening a vaccination site is also a consideration, but in San Francisco there are not enough doses.
“If we have sufficient vaccines to meet the need for a mass vaccination site, we expect the site to be up and running,” Colfax said Tuesday. ‘Our goal is to open such sites as quickly as possible when the state provides more vaccine. We really need to get more doses and move through the phases of the state levels. ”
One of the major obstacles facing provincial officials in the first month of COVID-19 vaccine distribution is the tracing of the number of people who have received it. The federal government has allocated vaccines directly to state health departments, companies including CVS and Walgreens to administer at long-term care facilities, as well as veterans’ hospitals and Indian health centers. Government officials have supplied large quantities of vaccines directly to private healthcare providers in various provinces, such as Kaiser Permanente, Palo Alto Medical Foundation and Sutter Health, as well as provincial health departments for public and local private hospitals such as Stanford.
The California Department of Public Health tracked the number of vaccines distributed (approximately 2.5 million) and the number of people who received them (889,000). But to date, the state has not yet created an easily accessible public dashboard with detailed information on vaccinations.
In Santa Clara County, a health order implemented last week now requires vaccine providers to hand over data daily that includes the number of vaccines administered, appointments per day, unused vaccines, clinic sites and information about who has been vaccinated. District 6 Supervisor Matt Haney advocates in San Francisco for a similar level of transparency.
“There are a lot of inequalities in the distribution of vaccines and access to information on how many vaccines we have and what we will receive,” Haney said. ‘Some provinces get more vaccine doses than San Francisco. Many of the doses of vaccines go to units with more provinces, which are mostly private providers. But with that said, provinces could request more doses and would expect to receive tens of thousands of additional doses in the coming weeks. ”
With nearly two-thirds of the vaccines to be distributed by the state, California must lag far behind other states in the rate of vaccinations. The lack of transparent data has caused a major problem because local health departments responsible for updating the public on the vaccination process do not know how many doses private providers have yet to distribute.
Some issues may soon be rectified because officials in San Francisco and Santa Clara County have expressed optimism that they will receive a influx of doses shortly after President Joe Biden is inaugurated, but they also know that vaccinate, rely on urgency – and willingness to cooperate – with private providers.
“We know that other suppliers in the country such as Stanford and Kaiser are expanding their own sites, including sites for mass vaccination,” Smith said. “They get direct vaccines and they have a majority of the country’s population.”
It is private providers, not provincial health departments, who can be the driving force behind turning stadiums into mass vaccinations. Provinces, including Santa Clara and Alameda, have created online portals that allow people to sign up to be notified when it’s their turn to be vaccinated, but most residents are likely to receive their vaccinations from private providers.
With government Gavin Newsom announcing on Wednesday that all residents aged 65 and over are eligible for vaccination, private providers are facing tremendous pressure to increase their vaccination process and to find spaces outside hospitals and clinics to help people ent.
In San Francisco, Haney sees a way for collaboration between private providers and the Department of Public Health to speed up the vaccination process.
“In San Diego, Petco, they do 5,000 vaccinations a day with thousands of volunteers and a massive public-private partnership to do it, and we need that in San Francisco,” Haney said. ‘It feels to me like common sense to use the sites and the opportunities we have to distribute this vaccine. The longer it takes to vaccinate everyone, the longer this pandemic will continue. ‘
Smith told the Board of Supervisors the Department of Public Health in Santa Clara County is currently looking for a large indoor site with ample parking where 10,000-20,000 vaccines can be administered daily, but a site has not yet been completed.
Despite the SAP Center, home of the San Jose Sharks, which is an obvious choice in Santa Clara County because of the size and recent use of the site as a COVID-19 testing center, has no local officials or team officials. an indication given that any Bay Area not stadiums, except for one exception, will be opened as a vaccination site in the immediate future.
The exception appears to be the Oakland Coliseum, as the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Authority on Friday revised a key plan that could enable health care providers to turn the stadium’s extensive parking lots into a mass vaccination site shortly after it received approval.
Until vaccine data provided by both public and private providers is made accessible in a centralized location and provinces gain clarity on the amount of doses available in their jurisdictions, it appears that the process of vaccinating most Bay residents a crazy blow will remain.