California’s COVID vaccine shipments are being delayed by winter storms pounding U.S.
The nation’s winter storms have delayed vaccine shipments to California, forcing some health care entities in the Sacramento region to cut back on shot-giving just as many were ramping up, local officials reported Thursday afternoon.
Sacramento County health officials say they have been told their weekly shipment, normally due on Thursday, has been delayed, forcing them to send word out to community injection sites that they may have to cancel or delay appointments in the coming days.
“There are currently shipment delays due to the severe weather events happening in other parts of the country,” county spokeswoman Brenda Bongiorno told The Sacramento Bee. “Some partner clinics may have to either cancel, delay or reduce capacity due to these delays.”
The county and healthcare providers are working “to shift doses around to cover as many prescheduled appointments as possible this upcoming week.
“Priority will be given to second dose appointments, however shortages may result in a delay in some second dose appointments,” Bongiorno said. “While getting your second dose on time is ideal, the CDC allows second doses to be administered up to 6 weeks after the first.
“We’re hopeful as soon as the weather clears, we’ll receive our doses. However, we request patience and understanding as we adapt to changing situations.”
Two other Northern California health providers, Sutter Health and Kaiser Permanente, have told The Bee they must reduce the number of shots they are able to give this week due to delayed deliveries of doses.
Sutter Health opened its appointments to those 65 or older earlier in February, opening centers in Sacramento and Roseville to vaccinate patients.
But since late last week, the provider says on its patient website that it lacks supply to schedule first-dose appointments “until further notice.”
“Inclement weather has additionally impacted already allocated doses which were en route, causing further impacts to Sutter, as well as other health systems,” Sutter Health spokeswoman Liz Madison said Thursday.
Madison said Sutter Health has administered more than 260,000 doses of vaccine to date to health care workers and patients ages 65 and older.
“We scaled rapidly and have the capacity to vaccinate tens of thousands of patients a day throughout our footprint, but our ability to do so remains dependent on vaccine supply. As soon as more vaccine is made available to us, we will reopen appointments.”
Kaiser Permanente health officials in Northern California on Thursday said they, too, are affected.
“The extreme cold weather that has affected much of the country has caused delays in the delivery of some of the supply of COVID-19 vaccine allocated for Kaiser Permanente,” a spokeswoman told The Bee. “We are in contact with federal and state health officials to track these delays and our operations teams are working to minimize any potential impact to the administration of vaccine at our facilities.
If any appointments are affected by this delay we will reach out directly to individuals to reschedule.”
The state was set to receive around 1.1 million doses this week, and next week’s 1.25 million shown in allocation data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would mark the biggest allotment to date.
But the “arctic blast” cold snap that continues to pummel the vast majority of the U.S. with a mix of snow, freezing rain and subfreezing temperatures is impacting multiple major distribution hubs, casting uncertainty on coronavirus vaccine supply. CDC and Biden administration officials have said this week the severe weather is expected to create “widespread” shipment delays for at least the next few days.
“The weather is having an impact,” Jeff Zients, President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 czar, said in a Wednesday morning COVID-19 briefing. “It’s having an impact on distribution and deliveries from the delivery companies and the distribution companies.”
Later Wednesday, a White House official told McClatchyDC that shipments impacted by the storms “will likely deliver 24-48 hours later than originally scheduled, weather dependent.”
Sacramento County health officer Dr. Olivia Kasirye told The Bee earlier this week she doesn’t know how many doses the county might get next week.
In Southern California, San Diego County Supervisor Nathan Fletcher in a weekly briefing confirmed that several shipments of both Pfizer and Moderna doses that were set to arrive this week have been delayed due to the weather, NBC San Diego reports. Fletcher said the county’s vaccine centers may have to put appointments on hold as early as Thursday.
And along the Central Coast, San Luis Obispo County health officer Dr. Penny Borenstein said a shipment set to arrive Tuesday had not been sent out by the distributor as of Wednesday afternoon. The county was relying on some of those shots for second-dose appointments next week.
Pfizer’s U.S. manufacturing base for its COVID-19 vaccine is in Michigan, and Moderna’s is in Massachusetts, meaning distribution routes to California are bogged down by snow and ice.
National Weather Service forecasts predict the major winter storms will continue through at least Friday.
California to date has administered about 6.7 million of the 8.7 million doses that have been delivered to providers, which include county health offices and hospital systems operating in multiple counties, according to the California Department of Public Health.
Snags to providers’ supply levels predate this week’s winter storms, and the weather could exacerbate existing issues.
CDPH in a new data dashboard established this week is tracking how many doses each provider has “on hand.” These are the numbers “provided by each entity into the CDC’s Vaccine Database” of doses in inventory and not yet injected.
The state’s several dozen health offices and multi-county hospital systems had a combined 1.55 million doses on hand, according to a Thursday morning update. At California’s pace of administering doses in recent weeks, that’s somewhere between one and two weeks of vaccine.
But CDPH notes that a large portion of this total “may likely be reserved for appointments already planned for the week,” some of which will be second doses scheduled three or four weeks earlier, in keeping with Pfizer and Moderna’s dosing regimens.
Kaiser Permanente has a plurality of the state’s doses on hand at just over 195,000, but in a Tuesday night update to its website, the health provider said it had more than 144,000 future appointments scheduled.
The data tracker shows Sutter Health with more than 64,000 doses on hand. It has only been two weeks since the provider opened first-dose appointments broadly to patients ages 65 through 74, so a significant number of those may be waiting in reserve as second doses that would start going into arms about a week from now.
Both the CDC and CDPH in recent weeks updated their guidelines to say that the timing for the second dose may be stretched out to up to six weeks after the first shot, if receiving them three weeks (for Pfizer) or four weeks apart (Moderna) is “not feasible.” This will give some leeway if supply issues impact the timing of second-dose appointments.
California’s latest COVID-19 numbers
California to date has reported more than 3.4 million lab-confirmed cases of COVID-19, and nearly 48,000 of them have died, according to CDPH data updated Thursday.
The state is rebounding from a sharp winter surge that peaked around the start of the year. Improvement has also been sharp: CDPH reported an average of just over 9,000 cases per day over the 14 days leading up to Thursday, down from a rate of more than 40,000 a day for the first two weeks of 2021.
The rate of diagnostic tests returning positive has likewise fallen from a peak of 14% to 3.9% as of Thursday’s update from CDPH. It’s the first time California’s two-week positivity rate has been below 4% since Nov. 11.
The total number of hospitalized patients with confirmed coronavirus cases has dropped from nearly 22,000 in early January to about 7,900 as of Thursday.
Fatalities remain elevated but are beginning to fall. The state peaked at a two-week average of 542 COVID-19 deaths per day from late January into early February, but that is down to 390 for the past two weeks.
Sacramento area surpasses 2,000 virus deaths
The six-county Sacramento region — Sacramento, El Dorado, Placer, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba counties — has reported more than 146,000 combined positive cases and at least 2,036 virus deaths over the course of the pandemic, exceeding the 2,000-death milestone on Wednesday.
Sacramento County has confirmed 91,144 cases since the start of the pandemic, and at least 1,412 of those residents died of COVID-19. The county reported 214 new cases and 20 deaths in Wednesday’s update, followed by 249 cases and 10 deaths Thursday.
By date of death occurrence, December and January were Sacramento County’s two deadliest months of the pandemic. Local health officials have confirmed 383 deaths for December and at least 303 for January. They have also now confirmed 43 resident deaths for Feb. 1-9. Of the 10 newly reported Wednesday, five occurred in early February, one was from December and the rest were from January.
Prior to December, the county’s deadliest month of the pandemic was August, at 181 virus deaths.
The countywide total for hospitalized virus patients dropped from 212 on Wednesday to 204 by Thursday, with the ICU patient total falling from 61 to 60, according to CDPH.
Placer County health officials have confirmed a total of 19,457 infections and 223 deaths. Placer on Tuesday evening provided its first update in five days, reporting 258 new cases and one new virus death. The county on Wednesday added 24 cases and no new fatalities.
State data showed 63 virus patients in Placer hospitals as of Thursday, down from 67 Wednesday, but with the ICU total growing from 17 to 19.
Yolo County has reported a total of 12,341 cases and 181 deaths. The county added 86 cases for the reporting period of Sunday through Tuesday, followed by 52 cases and nine new deaths on Wednesday.
Yolo officials recently noted that deaths are confirmed in groups, meaning there may be no deaths noted for several days and then many confirmed in a day or two.
State data showed Yolo holding at 11 virus patients including six in ICUs as of Thursday’s update, both the same as Wednesday.
El Dorado County has reported 8,982 positive test results and 91 deaths. The county reported just nine new cases Wednesday, after adding 118 cases and one death for the four-day reporting window of Saturday through Tuesday.
El Dorado has reported a significant spike in virus deaths compared to the first several months of the health crisis: 87 county residents have died of COVID-19 since Nov. 25, compared to four from last March through mid-November.
State data show El Dorado with five patients hospitalized with confirmed cases of COVID-19 including three in intensive care as of Thursday, both the same as Wednesday.
In Sutter County, at least 8,722 people have contracted the virus and 93 have died, officials said Wednesday. Yuba County, which shares a health office with Sutter, has reported 5,649 infections and 36 dead.
The lone hospital serving the Yuba-Sutter bicounty region — Adventist-Rideout in Marysville — had 29 hospitalized virus patients in state data updates Tuesday through Thursday, down from 32 last Friday, and the ICU total has fallen from 11 to nine.
This story was originally published February 18, 2021 at 8:57 AM with the headline "California’s COVID vaccine shipments are being delayed by winter storms pounding U.S.."
