Co-Chair Of State Vaccine Task Force Says California Has New COVID-19 Inoculation Scheduling System | Wild Rivers Outpost | Del Norte, Curry Counties

The co-chairs of the California State Vaccination Task Force acknowledged at the State Senator Mike McGuire's town hall meeting on Tuesday that COVID-19 is not being vaccinated fast enough.

Lori Nezhura, deputy director of plans, preparedness and prevention at the California Office of Emergency Services, acknowledged the current confusion about who is eligible to receive the vaccine. She introduced the new scheduling system to residents of Northern California,

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"From today, people will be able to leave their contact information to be notified when it is their turn," Nezhura said. "Currently, we are piloting the system in Los Angeles and San Diego-people can use My Turn to determine eligibility and make appointments. We hope that the appointment setting feature will begin statewide in early February."

Nezhura and Dr. Timothy Brewer from the UCLA School of Public Health and Geffin School of Medicine and infectious disease expert Dr. Roberta Luskin-Hawk joined St. Joseph Health.

The audience at McGuire City Hall is about 10,000, and the surge in COVID-19 cases in Golden State has begun to slow down. Brewer said that from Christmas to mid-January, California has an average of about 40,000 new cases every day. He said the average has now dropped to about 25,000 new cases, and on Tuesday, more than 17,000 new cases were reported.

Brewer said that hospitalization for COVID-19 also dropped from an average of about 22,000 people a day from mid-December to mid-January to about 18,000 people.

He said: "The death toll is still about 400 per day." "But as long as the case rate continues to decline, the mortality rate will also decline.

Brewer said that although California suspended its regional home orders on Monday, hospitals are still full of COVID-19 patients. In areas where the intensive care unit occupancy rate is less than 15%, it should be on standby at home. On Monday, the California Department of Public Health announced that it will suspend home accommodation due to increased ICU capacity across the state.

However, Bruno said that in Sonoma County, the hospital has an average of about 100 patients per day and only 15 ICU beds. He said that in Mendocino County, an average of 18 patients are hospitalized, providing 7 ICU beds.

Brewer talked about the COVID-19 variants that are causing concern, saying that the variants found in the United Kingdom and South Africa are worrying because they seem to spread more easily.

Brewer also talked about the immunity of the herd.

He said: "Crowd immunization is indirect vaccination. For people who have been vaccinated or have developed immunity, the disease is no longer easily transmitted, so even those who have not been vaccinated are protected." The way we get there is through vaccination. We cannot get herd immunity by letting the disease spread in the population and having to suffer cases and deaths."

According to the county’s statistics, in Del Norte County, no new community cases were reported to the public health department on Wednesday, although a new case occurred among the county’s imprisoned population.

There are currently 18 active cases in Del Norte County. Public health officer Dr. Warren Rehwaldt said the county died of COVID-19 last week, the third death.

Rehwaldt said the Del Norte County Public Health Department is expected to also vaccinate California's Class 1a population (mainly including health care workers), and will begin vaccinating the elderly and those working in local schools next week.

He told supervisors on Tuesday that there are approximately 5,000 elderly people in Del Norte County and the county receives an average of about 200 to 300 doses of Moderna vaccine per week.

Rehwaldt said that the ultra-low temperature refrigerator freezer in Del Norte County is up and running, and can be directly vaccinated with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine, but it may take several weeks.

Nezhura said late on Tuesday that although the state has established benchmarks for vaccine priorities, counties and healthcare providers interpret them differently. According to the state's standards, stage 1b includes all people 65 years and older, emergency services personnel, food and agricultural workers, teachers and school staff. She said, but it depends on the provider to verify the information. Nezola said that some counties also choose to vaccinate people aged 75 and over, and it is up to school staff, food and agricultural workers to decide.

In order to ensure more effective vaccine distribution, California will manage it through a third-party regulatory agency. Nezhura said that the third-party regulatory agency should "solve the problem quickly." She said that the CDPH also announced on Monday that healthcare providers who did not use the existing vaccine in proportion to 65% or more could redistribute the unused vaccine dose.

"I want to assure everyone that we will continue to focus on fairness," Nejura said. "Low-income communities, communities of people of color and our higher age groups will be able to use the vaccine. Service providers will receive a certain degree of compensation because they have good access to underserved communities. Our goal is to build A system that can not only solve vaccine supply constraints, but also increase availability before spring."

Lusken Hawke, who attended the Humboldt County Town Hall meeting, said that since most of their staff have been vaccinated against COVID-19, the hospital can vaccinate patients. She said that although they are looking for a wider range of distribution, hospitals and public health departments have found that people who must be vaccinated are not functioning well in the state's current infrastructure.

In other words, according to Lusken-Hawk, the best option for the public to obtain vaccines is their primary care doctor or the local public health department.

She said: "Your doctor should check the patient list and say,'Okay, who is eligible?" "If you don't have a provider and you need a vaccine, you can register through the local county health department, which will send out an invitation Attend an invitation to an available vaccination clinic."

In Del Norte County, although he urged residents to get in touch with their health care providers, Rewaldt said that local medical institutions have not yet distributed vaccines to their patients. He said on Monday that talking to their primary care doctor will enable Del Norters to obtain a list of people who need the vaccine. He said the list will be handed over to public health.

When McGuire asked the public, someone asked if grandparents or grandparents who received the vaccine could be invisible around their grandchildren without having to distance themselves from society.

Brewer said that although scientists know that the COVID-19 vaccine is good at preventing serious diseases, there are still people who can spread it.

He said that even if they have been vaccinated, the grandparent can still pass it on to people who have not been vaccinated.

Lusken-Hawk said that clinical trials of the Moderna vaccine have shown that elderly patients are less protective than younger patients.

She said: "I think that as a medical profession, we will try to gradually learn more about how to predict whether someone is well-protected and whether someone should be particularly cautious." "You are older, you should still Take some preventive measures. These vaccines are likely to have important protective effects, but this is not yet sufficient evidence."

Brewer said whether people need to continue to use booster vaccines or new vaccines to protect people from COVID-19 is not known. He said that since the safety test of Moderna and Pfizer injections started last summer, scientists have only about six months of data.

He said: "Since the early days of the safety trials that started last summer, there has been no decline in protective measures." "The second thing is how much will the virus change? If the change is large enough, we may have to get boosted immunity or get a new vaccine. ."

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