As concerns about the rocky vaccine rollout continue, President Biden on Tuesday said states can expect to receive 17% more vaccine next week and get three weeks advance notice from the federal government about how much vaccine they will be getting.
Both would come as a welcome improvement to local health departments and medical providers who say the unpredictable, scarce vaccine supply from state and federal governments makes it almost impossible to plan ahead for appointments and vaccinate more people.
Biden also said the federal government has bought more doses from vaccine manufacturers Pfizer and Moderna and should have enough to vaccinate 300 million Americans “by end of summer, early fall.”
California will shift to an age-based system for prioritizing vaccinations in mid-February, Dr. Mark Ghaly, California’s secretary of Health and Human Services, said Tuesday. It’s a change from California’s initial strategy of weighing job-based risk, and health officials hope it will speed up and simplify the vaccination process.
Meanwhile, California’s reopening trajectory became clearer. A day after Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that the state could emerge from its strict lockdown due to improving intensive care unit capacity projections, each of the nine Bay Area counties returned to the purple — most restrictive — tier of California’s color-coded reopening blueprint.
In total, 54 California counties stayed in the most restrictive purple tier, which allows for activities like outdoor dining and indoor personal-care services, such as haircuts and nail appointments, for the first time since early December.
Three counties — Alpine, Mariposa and Trinity — were in the red tier, and Sierra County was in the best shape — the only county in the orange tier.
No California counties are in the least restrictive yellow tier, Ghaly said Tuesday.
Ghaly said some counties did “show promise” of moving toward a less-stringent tier.
But concerns still loom. Reopening will inevitably cause more cases, and if more infectious variants spread, that could set the state back.
“Variants, in general, are a concern,” Ghaly said Tuesday. “It can create resistance to our antibodies or resistance to tools in our toolkit. ... Thankfully, we have a relatively low number of cases today. ... If (the coronavirus) becomes more virulent, that gives us concern and guides the rest of our response to this pandemic.”
Ghaly said that the state’s lockdown rules could have prevented as many as 25,000 hospitalizations across the state and as many as 5,000 admissions into intensive care units.
“It’s not a moment to take down our guard,” he said.
Ghaly also defended the decision to ban outdoor dining as part of the stay-at-home order implemented last month, which was criticized by business leaders and some health experts who said there was no data tying virus transmission to outdoor dining. The decision was made in an effort to “reduce overall movement and overall mixing,” Ghaly said, as opposed to signaling that outdoor dining itself was risky.
Californians’ desire to socially mingle remains a worry for health experts. Every time a cherished holiday or social event — like Christmas or Thanksgiving — arrives, people tend to let their guards down, said Dr. George Lemp, a retired University of California epidemiologist. The next social event that could lead to widespread gatherings is the Super Bowl on Feb. 7.
“If you have people congregating indoors for a length of time and they’re not wearing masks and they’re mixing families, then there’s always the potential for transmission,” Lemp said. “That’s always a concern. Obviously, things are looking better and the vaccine is giving people a lot of hope, but we’re still facing a situation where the vast majority of people aren’t being vaccinated.”
California has scrambled to simplify its vaccine rollout, which has left it ranked 39th among the 51 states and the District of Columbia in per-capita vaccinations, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — even as the chief difficulty remains the limited quantities and inconsistency of federal supply.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said during a news briefing on Monday that under a new age-based system, people 65 and over and some essential workers — education workers, food and agriculture workers and first responders — will remain a top priority, along with health care workers and nursing home staff who were first to get vaccinated.
But after most of those groups get vaccinated, the state will transition to an age-based eligibility system, “which will allow us to scale up much more quickly to get vaccines to impacted communities much more expeditiously,” Newsom said.
Many Bay Area counties and health care providers have already adopted age-based prioritization — vaccinating those 75 and older first, and those 65 and older when vaccine supply allows for it. Marin County is prioritizing those 75 and older, as is Sonoma County, which is poised to open a vaccination clinic at Rohnert Park Community Center on Wednesday for residents 75 and older.
The four main arms of vaccine distribution in Marin County — the public health department, Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health and Marin Health — “all agreed to focus our next 25,000 doses on our older, most vulnerable residents,” Public Health Officer Dr. Matt Willis said during a COVID-19 update to the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday.
Some critics said California’s initial strategy, which factored in workers’ risk of exposure to the virus when considering their place in line — transportation workers, for instance, were placed in a higher tier than waste and wastewater workers — was too complicated and made it difficult for providers and local health departments to decide quickly who they could vaccinate. It is easier and faster to verify someone’s age than their occupation.
State and local officials have said that vaccinating older residents first would help reduce deaths and relieve some of the pressure on hospitals, since the majority of COVID-19 deaths and ICU admissions are among those who are 60 or older. But doing so also means that many essential workers under age 65 will have to wait longer to get immunized.
“There, of course, is going to be some sectors of our population who don’t come to the front of the line as quickly as others,” Ghaly said. “We’re working to make sure that communication is simple and well understood.”
The state also announced that a third party administrator will operate a statewide vaccine distribution network, but it did not provide details on who the administrator will be or how exactly it would change the existing vaccine distribution system.
California launched a pilot program called MyTurn that allows Californians to sign up to be notified when it is their turn and to schedule an appointment when they become eligible. It is available at myturn.ca.gov for all state residents to sign up, but only those in Los Angeles and San Diego counties can make appointments. It will expand elsewhere starting in February.
Michael Williams, Aidin Vaziri and Catherine Ho are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: michael.williams@sfchronicle.com, avaziri@sfchronicle.com, cho@sfchronicle.com
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