More vaccine doses, sites become available for Fresno County as eligibility widens
Eligibility for COVID-19 vaccines is rapidly expanding across California, opening up on Friday to anyone who has a family member who is already in a qualified category for the shots.
The family eligibility was announced Thursday by Gov. Gavin Newsom, and comes as an ever-increasing number of vaccine doses are being made available statewide.
In Fresno County, providers are scrambling to keep up with the constantly changing rules for who can get a coronavirus shot.
“We notified all of our medical partners (Thursday) night about the adjustment to the criteria, and we did some follow-up calls this morning,” Joe Prado, community health division manager for the Fresno County Department of Public Health, told reporters on Friday. “We’ve also gotten calls, people wanting confirmation about this” expanded eligibility.
In central Fresno, where the UCSF Fresno Covid Equity Project opened a drive-through/walk-up clinic this week in the parking lot at Fresno City College, Dr. Kenny Banh said they welcomed the expansion. “Things are changing day by day,” he said. “But if you come in and you have eligible vaccinated family members, we’ll take care of everyone (in the family).”
“We’re finding reasons to say yes, not finding reasons to say no,” Banh added.
The UCSF Fresno program was previously operating from a site on Shaw Avenue across from the Fashion Fair shopping center, but it was limited in how much traffic the site could handle
At the new Fresno City College site, in the parking lots along McKinley Avenue, “we’ve been doing over 500 vaccines a day,” Banh said. “We hope to ramp up in the coming weeks to over 1,000, and maybe over 1,500 or ideally 2,000 a day” if needed.
Prado said that at 500 shots per day, the UCSF site at the college is the clinic with the third-highest vaccination volume per day in Fresno County, behind a county-run clinic at the Fresno Fairgrounds in southeast Fresno and Sierra Pacific Orthopedic Center in northeast Fresno.
Appointments at the City College site are available through the state’s MyTurn online registration system, but Banh said about 80% of the shots given are to people who drive in or walk up on a first-come, first-served basis.
“We’re trying to keep equity in the forefront of all we do,” he said, “but at the same time we want to make sure we’re vaccinating as much as possible.”
People who are eligible for a coronavirus shot include health care workers; emergency services workers; senior citizens over the age of 65; workers in the education or child-care sectors; people who work in the agriculture or food industries, including farm workers, food processing workers, or employees of restaurants, grocery stores or other parts of the food-supply chain; people ages 16 to 64 with serious underlying medical conditions; utility workers who respond to emergencies; and employees in transportation work.
And, now, families of anyone in those categories can get a shot, too.
Prado said the new guideline affords considerable flexibility. “If you had a family member eligible, the entire family is now eligible to receive the vaccine,” he said. “You don’t have to be in line (with the family member); you just state that you have a family member in (an eligible) tier.”
For people who register with the state’s MyTurn system, or other vaccine clinics’ registration systems, Prado said people need to check a box for their family member’s eligible occupation, not their own.
More expansion of eligibility for shots is coming soon. Starting April 1, anyone age 50 and older, regardless of occupation or health status, can receive a vaccination. And on April 15, the state is opening eligibility completely for anyone age 16 and older.
The county’s allocations of vaccine doses through the state continues to grow – enough doses coming next week to give shots to about 42,000 people in Fresno County. Since mid-December, when the first shipments of vaccine arrived in Fresno County, the health department has received 369,000 doses.
That doesn’t count vaccines that have been provided to medical organizations such as Kaiser Permanente or Adventist Health that have operations in multiple California counties, nor does it include the growing number of doses distributed by the federal government to retail chain pharmacies including CVS, Walgreens and Rite Aid that are now providing shots.
So far, through Thursday, more than 353,000 vaccine doses have been administered in Fresno County, according to the state Department of Public Health. More than 109,000 residents, or about 10.6% of the county’s total population, have been “fully vaccinated” – either receiving both shots of the two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines, or one shot of the single-dose Jannsen/Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
And as more doses become available, more sites are coming online to meet the demand.
Earlier this week, a new clinic was opened in Selma with the capacity to provide about 200 shots a day. Opening next week will be clinics in Kerman, Mendota and Kingsburg.
On its web site, the Fresno County Department of Public Health details almost 90 sites where vaccinations are available, including county clinics, medical offices, community health clinics and retail pharmacies.
Even with the increasing number of sites, Prado said that mobile clinics to small rural farming communities flung across the sprawling county will be “essential” to vaccine efforts, and will be ramping up throughout April.
In those communities, many residents don’t have access to a regular doctor, and the process of registering for an appointment is not familiar to them. Additionally, Prado added, “having rural (mobile) sites is important so people don’t have to drive to metropolitan Fresno to get vaccinated.”
The county has conducted pop-up clinics in such remote communities as Cantua Creek, Helm and Five Points. On Saturday, the health department is holding a clinic at the Sikh temple in Selma as part of its outreach to the Punjabi community in southern Fresno County.
Use this map and zoom in or out to explore sites offering COVID-19 vaccines in Fresno County. Click on a marker for details.
Source: Fresno County Department of Public Health. Map: Tim Sheehan | The Fresno Bee
This story was originally published March 26, 2021 at 5:20 PM.
