Accompanied by Mayor Eric Corsetti and LA County Superintendent Hilda Solis, the government visited Gavin Newsom Hospital, where four more people received a shot.
About 83,000 doses are expected to arrive in Los Angeles County this week. A FedEx plane carrying the region’s first shipment landed at Los Angeles International Airport on Sunday night, the airport said.
The vaccine, which is administered in two doses at three-week intervals, is expected to be first administered by health workers.
Kim Taylor, an emergency room nurse in Kaiser, reflected her role in state history as one of the first people to be vaccinated.
“We, the leading workers, have been working around the clock for the past nine months and love what we do and take care of our patients,” he said. “We’m doing this while trying to take care of our own families and keep them safe. I want you to know that help is known. Today is the first step.”
He encouraged others to consider taking the vaccine as soon as it became widely available.
But until then, Taylor insisted, “the best way you can support us nurses now” is to constantly wear masks, avoid meetings, and adhere to physical distance.
Kaiser was at four facilities in the state to receive the vaccine shipments on Monday, and will be delivered to 24 additional sites on Tuesday, Newsom said.
On Monday it had 33,150 sizes nationwide, which is part of a total of 327,000 sizes it expects to receive in the first batch from Pfizer.
The governor finally said how promising it is to be vaccinated, adding that this improvement is coming at a sober moment for the state.
“Let’s put this moment into perspective. This is a day to claim the fresh air of progress, which is resisting the old winds of normalcy,” Newsom said. “Nevertheless … we need to be calm and careful about the moment we are in, which is challenging and trying. Today we have received many scales across the state of California because there were new cases.”
The exact deadline for the general public to receive the vaccine has not been specified, but it is expected to be correct by 2021.
Meanwhile, Los Angeles County broke the record for admission to the Corona virus hospital over the weekend and San Francisco County announced its highest number of COVID-19 cases since the outbreak began.
Watch: CA, LA County breaks COVID-19 records again as hospitals receive vaccines
More than 30,000 COVID-19 cases were reported nationwide Sunday, bringing the total to more than 1,550,000 in California. Millions of Californians in the majority of the state are in shelter.
Barbara Ferrer, LA County Public Health Director, said case numbers could rise after the holidays.
“These Thanksgiving cases, on top of the already increasing cases, are creating extraordinary stress in our health system,” Ferrer said. “If there is another upsurge related to winter vacation following this, the number of hospital admissions and the number of patients in the ICU could be catastrophic.”
Southern California’s ICU capacity fell to 4.2% on Sunday.
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