The growing promise of coronavirus vaccinations in Sonoma County clashed Monday with the reality of scarcity of vaccines and extreme weather elsewhere, delivering the expected doses.
The supply problems were so severe that one of the largest healthcare providers in the province, Sutter Health, decided to schedule all first-dose appointments, and planned to reschedule the second-dose appointments for some patients.
Friday’s announcement that the province will immediately open vaccinations for residents aged 65 and older, as well as employees for food production, restaurant and grocery stores – the largest single expansion of vaccinations for vaccine here, with an estimated 63,000 more people living in eligible – looks like a watershed moment.
Kevin Cronin and his staff at Rosso Pizzeria & Wine Bar in Santa Rosa are waiting to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
“Everyone who works for me right now, they want to be vaccinated,” Cronin said Monday. ‘But it’s very difficult to know how to deal with it. As I do not personally know. They say call your primary care provider. So you call them and they say, ‘We do not know.’
It is certainly difficult to secure appointments for shots. And the province’s wider admission comes at a particularly difficult time in the vaccination effort that began in December.
The province closed several vaccination clinics for at least a day on Monday and medical providers rationed doses due to the disruption of the national distribution of vaccines caused last week by the icy weather and power outages in other parts of the state, especially Texas.
“It’s very frustrating,” said Dr. Urmila Shende, COVID-19 vaccine director at Sonoma County. “Especially because we have developed all these partnerships with different clinics, and we are ready to increase capacity. But what can you do with Mother Nature? ”
The province closed an affiliated clinic at Sonoma Valley High School, and two more at Sonoma Veterans Memorial Hall (both owned by Sonoma Valley Health Partners) and Rancho Cotate High School (through Sonoma County Office of Education) closed Monday. closed. while its partners waited for a weekly delivery of 5,100 doses of Moderna vaccine.
Those doses did not come back Monday, and state officials scrambled to scrap an additional clinic for Tuesday at the Grace Pavilion at the fair in Santa Rosa, one run by the Sonoma County Medical Association. Another Tuesday clinic on the Santa Rosa Junior College campus in Petaluma will run as planned, but will only administer the 84 doses that Petaluma Health Center already has on hand; it will cancel another 252 appointments.
Sonoma Valley Health Partners on Tuesday planned to host another clinic in the veterans’ hall, but decided not to schedule appointments in light of the shortage of vaccines.
Official health officials said Monday they contained kits containing syringes, bottles and other vaccination equipment. Shende considered this a good sign, as these shipments usually precede the additional doses of vaccines by 24 hours.
Unlike Sutter Health, Providence St. Joseph, operator of the Santa Rosa Memorial, Petaluma Valley and Healdsburg hospitals, has enough doses on hand to keep track of his appointment calendar for the week, Northern California director of pharmacy Saad Sultan said. Kaiser Permanente also said there were no delays in the vaccinations.
West County Health Centers follow an approach similar to Sutter. CEO Jason Cunningham said the non-profit organization was briefly containing three doses of vaccinations this week. They administered approximately 250 first doses per day in their clinics at Analy High School and Guerneville School, and they would add 250 doses this week.
“Instead, we only vaccinate the 250-second doses and stick to new doses until we have the assurance of adequate supplies,” Cunningham said.
Mendocino County health officials said Monday they are also eligible for vaccination for residents 65 and older.
The greater demand for shots places further the overwhelming collection of vaccination portals available to Sonoma County residents. On Monday, none of the sites linked to SoCoEmergency.org showed any vacancies except the OptumServe Clinic in Rohnert Park. The first appointment available there was March 18th.
Despite the pitfalls on Monday, many people welcomed the province’s decision on Friday to extend the vaccination capacity for residents aged 65 to 69. This finally brought the province in line with the country’s age criteria, after the California government, Gavin Newsom, announced on January 13 that everyone in the state was 65 and older immediately eligible for coronavirus vaccination. But Sonoma County, which was already facing a shortage of vaccine doses last month, initially set the venue at 75. Two weeks ago, the province increased the qualification for people aged 70 and older.
Cronin, the owner of the Rosso Pizzeria, was well aware of the study published in January by UC San Francisco medical researchers and concluded that the 25 jobs across the country with at least 100 pandemic deaths were the most dangerous. lynkok. Bakers and head chefs were at numbers 4 and 11, respectively, reflecting the high risk associated with the nearby area and the hectic activity of most restaurant kitchens.
Dean Molsberry, owner of Molsberry’s Market in the Larkfield-Wikiup neighborhood, has 72 employees who mostly want to be vaccinated to realize the virus-related risk they face on a daily basis.
“If you’re a controller, you’ve been dealing with customers all day, with every customer going through the registry,” Molsberry said. ‘You’re dealing with cash because people still want to pay cash. People are now bringing in suitcases. They will shop in their suitcases, so they touch everything you touch. “
Molsberry said the owners of Cal-Mart in Calistoga have arranged for a mobile vaccination team to come to the market to administer doses. But this is Napa County. Molsberry could not gather information on whether it could work in Sonoma County.
“Even if we had to send rows of people (to Napa County), I have no problem doing it,” he said.
After catching up with demand for seniors as well as food workers, knowing how to use a computer to log in will remain one of the biggest obstacles to being vaccinated against a plague that has now killed more than 500,000 Americans.
“I’m not a super computer-savvy man,” Cronin said. ‘I’m a business owner, I know how to come, but I’m not like some of these younger people. But the guys in my kitchen, they just do not know how to do it. ”
You can reach Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or [email protected]. On Twitter @Skinny_Post.