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Santa Clara County plans to open COVID-19 vaccines to residents and workers ages 50 and older on April 1, per Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement on Thursday. Whether the county will have enough doses to put in the arms of an estimated 400,000 people who fall into that category is a big unknown, according to the county’s testing and vaccine officer.
“We are excited to expand eligibility,” Dr. Marty Fenstersheib said during a Thursday afternoon press conference. “That is why we have been scaling up capacity so rapidly — so that we can quickly vaccinate as many eligible people who live and work here as possible. Our challenge is not one of capacity or eligibility, but supply,” Fenstersheib said.
Getting the vaccines has been a struggle, he said, noting the supply has been and continues to be “very limited.” The county received just 58,000 doses to distribute and administer next week. By comparison, the county has the capacity to vaccinate up to 200,000 people a week at its multiple sites, which range from mega-vaccination venues such as Levi’s Stadium and Mountain View Community Center to smaller community clinics that target people living in less-advantaged neighborhoods.
The allocation doesn’t include doses that health care giant Kaiser Permanente will receive or doses available at local pharmacies, he said. The latter receive their allocation directly from the federal government.
Fenstersheib said county health officers are concerned there will be a deluge of anxious people seeking shots, but won’t be able to receive them. The state has also announced that it expects to make anyone 16 years old and up eligible for the vaccines starting April 15.
So far, the efforts by Bay Area health providers and counties have been mired in a shortage of doses and a confusing rollout through the state’s third-party administrator, Blue Shield of California. The state’s system, which was designed to prioritize disadvantaged communities hit hardest by the pandemic, held back 40% of California’s allocations and dedicated them to those areas, according to county officials.
Santa Clara County saw its allocation slashed because its most vulnerable communities were not counted among the 400 ZIP codes the state earmarked for the priority doses. The state averaged Santa Clara County communities, which shared ZIP codes with adjacent wealthier communities in some cases, and they were therefore ignored by the state, county officials have said.
County officials announced on Wednesday that they had reached an agreement with the state to allow them more control over the distribution of vaccines so the community clinics serving the most vulnerable could receive extra doses if needed. Under the memorandum of understanding with Blue Shield, the doses could not be transferred.
The federal government has also said it expects the distribution of vaccine doses will flow better in April, Fenstersheib said. “It’s been a manufacturing issue,” he added.
Getting the vaccines quickly into people’s arms remains a priority. With only 58,000 doses for next week, officials aren’t sure when California will provide enough vaccine to cover an estimated 400K people.
“It’s a race to vaccinate every eligible person before the virus has a chance to mutate” and make the vaccines less effective, he said.
The emergence of multiple variants has been a concern to health officials. The county confirmed its first case of P1, a variant first identified in Brazil and of great concern. The county discovered the case during random analysis and tests in mid-March. The person who had the variant had been out of the state and traveled domestically.
The county strongly recommends that people avoid travel, he said. “There is a chance you’ll bring back the variant. We don’t want to give the virus a chance to mutate,” he said.
The Brazil variant is in addition to two confirmed cases of the B.1.351 variant, first detected in South Africa, and 19 confirmed cases of the B.1.1.7 variant, originally found in the United Kingdom, that have now been detected in the county as of March 20, the county said in a statement.
“So far, all of the available vaccines are effective to variants to a degree,” he said.
Anyone who is eligible for a vaccine can sign up on the county’s website, sccfreevax.org, which also shows vaccination sites. Fenstersheib urged people to not become frustrated if there are no appointments available. They should keep trying, and as more doses become available, appointments will open up.
Find comprehensive coverage on the Midpeninsula’s response to the new coronavirus by Palo Alto Online, the Mountain View Voice and the Almanac here.
Sutter Health has an enormous amount of appointments in both Sacramento and Modesto. If you’re eligible, and are able to travel a little, consider signing up there.
This statement “Anyone who is eligible for a vaccine can sign up on the county’s website, sccfreevax.org” is not actually true. The county’s website doesn’t have anywhere you can sign up, unlike the websites of other counties. It just has links to the various providers’ websites. You need to try each of them separately.
If you’re going to travel, realize that Moscone Center in San Francisco and the Federal site at the Oakland Coliseum are open to all, residents of any county. Seems closer than Sacramento or Modesto. The doses are available–just not in Santa Clara County which is getting shorted way more than any other Bay Area county. Sutter and Kaiser cover 1/2 the patients here and they aren’t mounting a big enough vaccine effort here. Unlike most counties what is happening here is that the county ITSELF is administering the bulk of the vaccines. The other providers are mostly small operators. Stanford Medicine and El Camino Health have a very hard time getting doses.
The upshot is that while the state average for at least one dose is at 34%, We are only at 31%. San Mateo County is at 44%. We are getting treated unfairly. The state has the doses. It has 5.1M more doses from the CDC than have been administered, and it only does 280,000 per day. It will take a long time to use up that 5.1M excess since more doses come all the time, over 2M per week.
860K doses received in the county, 420K at the county health system, 166K at Kaiser and 100K at Stanford Medicine. It should be about 20% more doses than that. San Mateo County has had about 410K doses and it is 40% of the population of Santa Clara County. It’s not even clear that San Mateo County is counting the doses received at the VA, Federal Health Care, Sutter and Kaiser either. The SCC 860K number includes all of these routes for delivery of vaccine doses from the Feds.
Hopefully the state will wake up and stop shorting Santa Clara County, but until then, consider a trip to Moscone or checkout CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid, Safeway and Costco. The drug stores operate outside the state’s wacko system.