All county health workers can now be inoculated, which includes, among others, those who work in primary care or primary care clinics, dental offices, or pharmacies. Previously, only front-line workers in hospitals and nursing homes could receive the shot.
Officials are looking to speed up the launch, which has been considerably slow as cases continue to rise, with the possibility that vaccines will expire if they are not distributed in time.
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The county wants to vaccinate 500,000 health workers by the end of January.
The five new vaccine distribution sites, which are expected to open across the county next week, will be added to the city-operated vaccination site that will open this week at Dodger Stadium, which had been the site of largest COVID-19 tests in the country.
The county already has dozens of vaccination sites across the area that provide doses of medication. The new high-capacity sites (the places where they were not released) “will allow us to speed up vaccinations for front-line health workers,” county public health director Barbara Ferrer said Monday.
“These five sites, in addition to our private partner sites, will allow us to complete an additional 500,000 vaccines among our health workers by the end of January,” he said.
If vaccinations for the bulk of county health workers are completed by the end of the month, the next phase of the distribution effort is expected to begin in early February. This phase, known as 1B, would include people aged 75 and over and some categories of essential workers. By the end of March, the county expects to begin Phase 1C, which will include people 50 years of age or older or people over the age of 16 with underlying health conditions that put them at risk for serious illness.
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The vaccination effort comes as the county and state continue to experience an increase in COVID-19 cases and deaths, with one person dying on average every eight minutes in the county and ten people testing positive every minute.
Ferrer said the county “is rapidly increasing our pace to reach the macabre milestone of one million cases.”
With 12,617 new infections confirmed Monday, along with 122 reported by Pasadena health officials and 88 by Long Beach, the countywide total since the pandemic began was 932,908. The county also announced another 137 deaths Monday from COVID-19, while Pasadena confirmed another fatality, bringing the county-wide death toll to 12,388.
Hospitals continue to be infested with coronavirus patients, with only 650 beds available, including 48 intensive care beds, available as of Monday at the 70 centers receiving 9,911 recipients. But officials expressed some casual optimism in setting up new hospital admissions in recent days.
According to the state, there were 7,926 COVID-19 patients in LA county hospitals as of Monday, including 1,724 in intensive care. Last week the total number exceeded 8,000. Gov. Gavin Newsom said Monday that over the past two weeks, the number of people hospitalized has risen 6 percent in the past 14 days, “among the smallest increases we’ve seen in a two-week period in a while.
“It’s just a point of optimism, a little light,” Newsom said, while warning that another leap in hospitalizations given the last winter break is still possible.
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Los Angeles County Health Director Dr. Christina Ghaly also noted that hospitalization figures appear to have “stabilized” after drastic rises in recent weeks, but that overcrowding in hospitals has not yet he had been relieved. in hospitals, more than half of all hospitalized patients are being treated for COVID-19 and more than 75% of ICU patients have the virus. He said those numbers are similar for other hospitals across the county.
“We still have patients who are on board at the emergency department and we still have our clinical care teams that care for more patients than they would under normal circumstances,” Ghaly said.
“… There is still a shortage of staff across the county in every hospital in the health facility and we are still very much in the midst of a deadly wave,” he said. We are looking at the data very carefully over the next two days. , as it is the time when we would expect to start seeing the increase in patients from the last Christmas and New Year holidays “.
County supervisor Hilda Solis, who urged residents to adhere to infection control measures again, such as putting on masks and staying home as long as possible, offered a smile. reminder of the continuing severity of the pandemic, pointing out the pain of people dying of COVID. -19 to a hospital, separated from loved ones.
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“Dying from COVID in the hospital means dying alone,” Solis said. “… Families share their last goodbyes on tablets and cell phones.”
Solis said he has heard stories from health workers about these conversations, saying they often include children or younger relatives who apologize to parents or grandparents for bringing the virus home.
“These apologies are some of the last words loved ones will hear when they die alone,” Solis said. Please don’t let this be your family. Don’t let them be your parents or grandparents “.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, nearly 5 million people have been tested for COVID-19, with a positive 18%.
City News Service contributed to this report.
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