California will soon expand the list of people eligible for coronavirus vaccination to another 4 to 6 million people by adding severely disabled people and people with health conditions that put them at risk for infections and deaths. .
Among those who will become eligible on March 15 are people with certain cancers, heart, lung and kidney conditions, as well as pregnant women, people with Down syndrome, organ transplant recipients and the severely obese. They join people 65 and older and those in high-risk job descriptions who were already eligible under the state plan.
California has been hit by the shortage of vaccines and Ghaly could not say how long it will take the state to vaccinate between an estimated 17 to 19 million people who will be eligible for the vaccine once the new additions are made.
“Without this crystal ball in the allocation it will be very difficult to respond,” he said. The country’s most populous state can expect to receive more than a million doses each week at least over the next few weeks, Ghaly said.
Each of the current vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) requires two doses to achieve full effectiveness. So it takes a million shots to cover 500,000 people.
Judy Mark, president of Disability Voices United, thanked the state for vaccination for people with disabilities, but said it should be immediate.
“The effective date of March 15 may be too late for many people with disabilities who in the meantime could die from COVID,” he said in a statement.
Ghaly said additional time is needed for the state to increase capacity. Some people with disabilities or certain health conditions will be harder to reach because they need to be vaccinated at home, he said.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state recognizes that people with certain physical and intellectual disabilities are “vulnerable.”
“I want the disability community to know, we’ve listened to you and we’ll do more and better to provide access, even with the shortage,” he said as he visited a mass vaccination site in San Francisco.
California is emerging from the worst stage of the pandemic. New virus cases and hospitalizations have dropped dramatically in the past three weeks and deaths exceeding 3,500 a week have also begun to decline, albeit more slowly.
The state began implementing vaccines in December as cases and hospitalizations exploded. Officials focused first on vaccinating people based on the level of risk in their work. Health workers were the first on the line and the state added educators, farm workers and emergency service workers. People in long-term care centers and those over 65 are also eligible.
Once the state passes these groups, it plans to move to an age-based system instead of one based on the job description. The state has not fully developed a plan for age-based criteria.
“We are working to determine what that age range will be and when that date will be triggered. It will be largely driven by the supply of vaccines,” Ghaly said.
The state decided to add people with disabilities and health conditions of any age after receiving criticism that it did not protect people at higher risk of infection and death from COVID-19.
Still, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, a California surgeon general, said doctors will have to judge and not allow everyone to be vaccinated.
“It’s really crucial that providers really recognize the scarce supply to ensure that those at higher risk can access the vaccine,” he told KGO-TV on Friday.
This will not be easy for doctors, said Dr. Louise Aronson, a professor of geriatrics at the University of California, San Francisco.
“It will be difficult for patients and it will be difficult for clinicians, but the way we overcome it is that we all prioritize the highest risk and that we are a little more patient longer, which is one of the most difficult questions right now. history, “he said.
California has opened many mass vaccination centers in recent weeks, but they are not operating at full capacity due to the shortage of vaccines. The city of Los Angeles temporarily closed the vaccination sites at Dodger Stadium and four other sites until supply could be replenished.
“We’re all frustrated. We know we could do a lot more if we had doses available,” said Dr. Paul Simon, head of science in Los Angeles County. He said the county could administer about 600,000 doses a week, but that it receives about 200,000.
California has administered 5.5 million doses to date and more than a million people have achieved both.
Also Friday, the state released data showing the age, race, gender, and county of vaccinated people. It only covers health care workers, long-term care residents, and people 65 and older, which means it’s not an exact reflection of the entire California population, state officials said.
Incomplete data is just information that officials rely on when trying to distribute vaccines to the most vulnerable people in California. The state has not published a breakdown of vaccines by zip code, which can be used to measure whether people in disadvantaged neighborhoods are being vaccinated, but it did provide a demographic breakdown of vaccines by county.
The data show that nearly a third of vaccines have been targeted at whites, nearly 16 percent to Latinos, more than 13 percent to Asian Americans, and less than 3 percent to blacks. Of the rest, 14% went to people who identified themselves as multiracial, 12% to those listed as “others” and the rest to “strangers”. The status is based on the personal identification or data of health care providers.
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Associated Press writers Janie Har in San Francisco and Amy Taxin in Orange County collaborated.