Bay Area governments and health care providers are opening new vaccine sites and increasing the number of shots given per day as California tries to catch up with much of the rest of the country by handing out doses through the worst rise of the pandemic. .
Local officials said Friday that the explosion of vaccines has been curtailed by a limited supply and a deluge in demand from residents over the age of 65 who are considered fit by the state to get vaccinations this week. Some provinces also mention the need for staff, facilities and time to scale up operations. California, which administered 1.2 million of the approximately 3 million vaccines it has received so far, has had one of the slowest explosions in any state.
“We need to increase the rate and distribution and administration of these vaccines,” Gavin Newsom said Friday during the opening of a mass vaccination center at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. “The reality is that we need to get these vaccines out of the freezer and that we need to get them into people’s arms.”
The need for vaccination became urgent on Friday when the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention warned that a highly transmitted virus variant spreading rapidly across the UK could make up half of US cases by March. The mutations do not make the virus more lethal, the report says, but because the transmission rate is higher, it will generally lead to more cases and deaths compared to the current variant.
The news comes when the global death toll from the pandemic was 2 million higher on Friday. Across California, the percentage of tests returning positive has declined, Newsom said, as well as new cases and hospitalizations. In the Bay Area, it appears that an increase in deaths in the upswing after the holidays is past its peak, although intensive care capacity is still low.
As local and state governments struggle to deal with the resistance and vaccinate the defenseless, President-elect Joe Biden announced Friday that he will use the Defense Production Act to achieve his goal of vaccinating 100 million Americans in the first 100 days.
Santa Clara County adviser James Williams said Friday that the recent political chaos with the outgoing government has made the explosion of vaccines even worse. The Washington Post reported Friday that a promised federal supply of vaccines was in fact empty. Newsom said he did not expect the problem would hurt California residents to get their second dose in a two-shot regime, but said it was based on federal government assurances, and ‘We are now aware of the importance of verifying that information. ”
Carrie Owen Plietz, president of the Kaiser Permanente region of Northern California, said at a news conference with San Francisco officials on Friday that once more vaccines come in, the health care system is trying to get people to access them.
“Once we receive vaccines, we work actively to get them into individuals’ arms,” she said.
San Francisco plans to open three mass vaccination rooms with the goal of administering at least 10,000 or more vaccines a day, said Mayor London Breed and health director, dr. Grant Colfax, announced Friday, but first the city needs adequate supplies.
“Vaccine doses remain limited. “We are ready for more doses, we need more doses, we are asking for more doses,” Breed said. “We are not sitting on any vaccines. They all move out the door. ”
In Alameda County, officials were able to convert the Oakland Coliseum into a mass coronavirus vaccination site as quickly as in February. The Coliseum was previously used as a coronavirus testing facility, as a polling station and as a distribution point for influenza vaccine.
In Contra Costa County, private and public health systems have so far dispensed about 36,000 of nearly 72,000 doses, with another 33,000 doses underway, officials said at a news conference Friday. Dr. Ori Tzvieli, head of the county for COVID-19 response, said scaling up vaccine surgeries is much more complicated than testing.
The province has opened 20 vaccination sites and plans to add more in Antioch and Richmond next week.
“We are at the start of the largest public health vaccination campaign in history,” provincial supervisor Diane Burgis said Friday at a vaccination center in Pleasant Hill. “We ask that everyone be patient. Your turn is coming and when it’s your turn, we ask you to be vaccinated. ”
The province is working with paramedics to possibly administer vaccines and is considering opening a mass vaccination site, but does not yet have enough doses to do so, Tzvieli said.
Limited supply is not enough to meet current demand as California on Wednesday begins a process for residents over the age of 65 to get vaccinated. The overwhelming interest in booking Thursday appointments has caused the Sutter Health website to crash and some people have set aside hours with Kaiser Permanente. Health Director Anna Roth received approximately 1,000 appointments per hour on Contra Costa County Health Services’ website.
On Thursday, Kaiser received four times the normal call volume in just one call center, Kaiser’s Plietz said Friday. The spokesman said the system still had an ‘extremely high’ call volume and latency. At the end of next week, Kaiser expects to have online self-service tools with which eligible individuals can schedule an appointment if a vaccine is available.
A Sutter spokesman said Friday the site is up again, but the wait times will still be long. The health system gives preference to giving shots to health workers and older than 75 years.
Contra Costa County Health Services also gives priority to those over the age of 75, while still accepting information and later planning appointments for people over the age of 65, Tzvieli said. The province hopes to vaccinate everyone in the appropriate age group before the end of February.
In Marin County, more than a third of the population is at the current level of vaccination, including those older than 65 years. Dr. Provincial health officer Matt Willis said demand would exceed supply for several weeks and asked healthier seniors to be patient.
In Sonoma County, dr. Sundari Mase, the province’s interim health official, said in a newsletter on Friday that “the roll-out depends on the vaccine.” She expected teachers to be vaccinated the first week of February and said the province is working with its human resources department, police and EMS to vaccinate other essential workers according to schedule.
“If we have the stock of vaccines that continue, I do not think it will knock anyone out of the current plan,” she said.
Local hospitals treated 2,106 coronavirus patients on Thursday, the lowest number in ten days. This is a bright spot, but Bay Area leaders said they were still very concerned about the current availability of intensive care. The number of deaths recorded on Friday was the highest since the start of the pandemic – with 688 deaths attributed to the coronavirus early in the evening – and the availability of ICUs in the Bay Area region, affecting the nine provinces as well as the provinces Santa Cruz and Monterey include. remained alarmingly low, at 3.4%.
“This is not the time to lower our guard,” Santa Clara County Superintendent Otto Lee said in a newsletter Friday. ‘All that is needed is a family eating a delicious dinner with their masks to spread it. Please walk a little more, a few months more. ‘
The authors of Chronicle staff, Trisha Thadani, Erin Allday, Catherine Ho, Aidin Vaziri and the Associated Press, reported.
Mallory Moench is a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: @mallorymoench