San Francisco officials said Wednesday that they hope all eligible residents will be vaccinated by June, but to meet the target will require daily vaccination numbers and a large increase in the available supply.
“The biggest obstacle is that there are not enough doses,” Roland Pickens, chief executive of the San Francisco Health Network, told a Supervisory Board hearing Wednesday. “We acknowledge that the process has been slow and frustrating for all of us.”
As of Monday, only 3.4% of the population of San Francisco had received one dose of the vaccine. That equates to 29,599 people. Meanwhile, only 0.7% of the population – or 6,483 people – received a second dose.
There are approximately 870,000 residents in San Francisco, but children are unlikely to be eligible by June. Currently, people must be at least 16 years old to receive a vaccine.
California state officials have complained that the state and federal government have provided an inadequate and unpredictable vaccine supply. This made it difficult to plan how many appointments could be made on a given day, and how many staff would be needed to administer the shots.
The public health department and private health care providers currently vaccinate about 3,000 people a day in San Francisco, Pickens said. To meet the city’s goal of vaccinating everyone by June, San Francisco must act to give at least 10,000 shots a day, he said.
“If we are to succeed, we must have an unprecedented level of cooperation,” Pickens said. “It’s a hard effort.”
On Friday, the Department of Public Health and private providers – including UCSF, Kaiser and Sutter – will help open the city’s first mass vaccination at City College in Ocean Avenue near Interstate 280.
Those who are eligible for a vaccine, such as health professionals and 75 years and older, will be contacted by their provider and invited to the website. The city also plans to have two other mass vaccination sites – at the Moscone Center in SoMa and The SF Market, a wholesale product site in Bayview – which will be operational by February 1st.
It is not yet clear how many doses are available by now, as Mayor London Breed said on Tuesday that the vaccine would not be vaccinated by Thursday. It was unclear whether it was still worrying on Wednesday.
An important challenge is access to adequate and predictable vaccine supply, ‘said Dr. Josh Adler of UCSF said. “One of the most important points is to know when the vaccine is coming, and it has been a struggle so far.”
Trisha Thadani is a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected]