Los Angeles Dodger Stadium will be launched as a mass vaccination site starting Friday morning, City Mayor Eric Garcetti announced Thursday.
The site, which the mayor referred to as the “largest vaccination site in the country,” will have the capacity to vaccinate 12,000 people each day. According to Garcetti, a whole staff has been deployed to administer the vaccines.
“This vaccine is safe, this vaccine is safe,” he repeatedly stressed, urging residents to get the vaccine once they are eligible.
“It is your civic duty when you have to take this vaccine. It is an act of love for your fellow citizen because it will save the lives of someone or the lives of many people, and it is a step forward to reopen our schools and our economy.
Who can get the vaccine: In Los Angeles County, the vaccine is currently only available to health care workers and seniors living in nursing homes and skilled nursing homes. Although the county has about a million health workers, Garcetti said about half of them have not yet received the vaccine.
“The bottom line is that we don’t have enough vaccines,” Garcetti said.
He also said some sites may reserve their vaccine allocation to administer the second dose to their healthcare workers.
With the opening of Dodger Stadium and five additional county vaccination sites, Garcetti said he expects hundreds of thousands to be vaccinated each week.
What’s up in Los Angeles County: The county has a total of 975,299 coronavirus cases and 13,234 deaths.
Hospitalizations in the county continue to overwhelm hospitals and health care workers, and there are currently 7,906 people treated in the hospital with coronavirus, 21% of them in the intensive care unit.
Garcetti said that while there are early signs that hospitalizations in the county may stabilize, “it’s not even close to coming out of the woods.”