By 
Spencer Custodio |
Orange County seniors, age 65 and older, can now get coronavirus vaccinations after county public health officials pushed the vulnerable group to priority levels.
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Rural health officer and director of OC Health Care Agency, dr. Clayton Chau, said a task force meeting was held Sunday night.
“Almost everyone signed the call Sunday night,” Chau said Tuesday during the County Supervisors’ public virus update. “We will start vaccinating seniors 65 and older in Orange County and add them to Tier 1a.”
Healthcare workers and first responders are also listed at that level.
The new pressure for the elderly comes after widespread criticism of slow vaccinations, not just in OC, but across the country.
After seeing slow-moving public health officials, they called local health departments up and down the state and warned them to increase vaccination efforts or to lose their doses.
“The state was in a state of panic,” Chau said.
Chau told supervisors Orange County has received additional doses from other provinces “which it can’t do fast enough.”
‘So we got 170,000 doses. We left nothing behind, “said Chau. “Because we left nothing to the state, the state only gave us 6,000 doses this morning.”
The renewed vaccination efforts also come after concerns from local doctors, dentists, nurses, medical help and other health professionals not affiliated with hospitals.
Hospital workers were the first to start the dual vaccination process last month, when OC received the vaccinations.
Chau said seniors should contact their primary care physicians to help make appointments to begin the vaccinations.
“We have a pharmacist vendor working with us for free,” Chau said.
According to a news release at the end of last year, hundreds of elderly care institutions are planned to receive vaccines.
“The program will enable provinces to utilize CVS and Walgreens pharmacy staff to administer the vaccine more widely, while pharmacy staff will go directly to care facilities. Skilled nursing homes receive vaccine from CVS and Walgreens staff. “Approximately 72 competent nursing homes and 900 residential care facilities for the elderly will be provided by CVS and Walgreens throughout Orange County,” the release said.
Chau said provincial officials are also looking for smaller vaccination sites for the vulnerable population that should not be among large crowds.
Attempts to vaccinate the elderly come after numerous elderly readers expressed concern about their first doses via email to Voice of OC.
Meanwhile, medical workers are being vaccinated at three sites in the country, including the Orange County Fire Authority headquarters in Irvine.
Eligible workers – doctors, nurses and medical assistants – must register before an appointment, there is no startup.
According to the health care agency officials in the province, 800 to 1000 people are vaccinated per day.
As of Tuesday afternoon, no appointments were available.
“Come check back often,” the website said.
Disneyland is reportedly the first of five vaccination supersites.
Last week, Oliver Chi, manager of Huntington Beach City, told Voice of OC that the other major vaccination sites will be at Knott’s Berry Farm, the Orange County Fairgrounds, The Great Park and Soka University.
Chau said “there are rumors” that the federal government wants to send even more vaccinations to California.
But at a Tuesday news conference, the secretary of the state agency for health and human services, dr. Mark Ghaly, not given details on when more vaccines will hit the state.
Ghaly said they would announce the “prospect of getting additional vaccine supplies in the coming days.”
By the end of the week, the state had set a goal of 1 million new vaccinations.
On July 4, public health officials in Orange County set a goal to provide herd immunity – meaning that 70%, or more than 2.2 million people, should be vaccinated by that time.
Chau said the five major vaccination sites need to administer about 8,000 doses a day if OC wants to reach the July 4 goal.
There is still no time frame for opening the major websites.
‘We’ll roll it out based on the amount of vaccine we can get in Orange County. So we are not going to open it all up if the vaccine is not available, “Chau said.
While officials are vying for more vaccines, the province’s hospitalizations have declined slightly.
According to the county, 2,200 people were admitted to the hospital, including 535 in intensive care units, according to the County Health Care Agency.
“Currently, this is the highest number of people ever in the hospital compared to our summer boom,” Chau said at the supervisors’ meeting Tuesday.
The trends towards hospitalization will stabilize somewhat this week after the daily numbers held records for at least a month in a row.
But deaths are on the rise.
The virus has now killed 2,148 people out of 195,685 confirmed cases, including 28 new deaths reported Tuesday.
Newly reported deaths can last for weeks due to delays.
In the past week, 222 new deaths were reported.
OC also reported 3,824 new cases on Tuesday.
The province has averaged more than 3,300 new cases per day over the past week.
Public health officials estimate that about 12% of all newly infected people are hospitalized within three weeks.
This means that there could be more than 2,700 people in the hospital in the coming weeks, as stabilized patients are discharged as quickly as possible.
The virus has killed more than three times as many people as the flu each year.
In context, Orange County has averaged about 20,000 deaths a year since 2016, including 543 annual flu deaths, according to health status data.
According to the state’s death statistics, cancer kills more than 4,600 people, heart disease kills more than 2,800, more than 1,400 die as a result of Alzheimer’s disease and strokes kill more than 1,300 people.
According to Orange County, Orange County has already exceeded its annual average of 20,000 deaths, with 21,110 people dying in November. latest available state data.
It is a difficult virus for the medical community to tackle because some people show no symptoms but can still spread it. Others feel slight symptoms, such as fatigue and mild fever.
Others end up in ICUs for days and weeks before making it out, while others eventually die from the virus.
Ghaly said early data indicated that the long-feared holiday boom was not as bad officials initially thought, but said it was still too early to know whether issues stemming from the holiday period would rise further. on an increase will cause.
“We still expect it to rise in the middle of the month.”
Here is the latest information on virus numbers in Orange County:
Infections | Hospitalizations and deaths | City-by-city data | Demographics
Spencer Custodio is a reporter for Voice of OC. You can reach him at [email protected] Follow him on Twitter @SpencerCustodio