Fresno, Valley have the worst COVID-19 vaccination rates in California. What’s going on?
About 1.4 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been injected into the arms of Californians since drug companies received emergency approval from federal regulators last month.
That’s about 35 vaccinations for every 1,000 residents of the state as of Sunday.
Yet in Fresno and the rest of the central and southern San Joaquin Valley, the pace of vaccinations is less than half the statewide average – just over 17 people vaccinated per 1,000 residents, according to data from the California Department of Public Health.
That’s the lowest rate among six regions of the state.
In Fresno County, health officials said this week that they are receiving thousands of fewer doses per week than they had anticipated of the the two vaccines – one produced by Pfizer-BioNTech, the other by Moderna.
That, combined with working out the bugs last week on their first efforts at large-scale immunization clinics for both health care professionals and senior citizens, is limiting their ability to offer shots more rapidly to a larger number of people.
Since mid-December, the county has received about 86,000 doses of vaccine, said said Joe Prado, community health division manager for the Fresno County Department of Public Health. All of those have been redistributed to providers who are offering vaccinations, including local hospitals.
That doesn’t include additional doses that have been sent to health systems that have facilities in more than one county, like Kaiser Permanente, Adventist Health and the Veterans Affairs Health Care programs.
The county has developed a capacity to deliver about 30,000 doses each week as it strives to vaccinate 750,000 people by the end of the summer, Vohra said. But allocations from the state are currently running between 8,000 and 10,000 doses a week, Prado said this week.
Calls to increase supply
Fresno County requested an additional 20,000 doses from the state this week, but was notified yesterday that it would only receive 5,100 more doses of the Moderna vaccine, Prado said.
The limited number of available doses coming to local counties come as demand for vaccines is ramping up, after state and federal officials announced last week that senior citizens over the age of 65 would be immediately eligible, along with health care workers. That was a change from previous vaccine rollout plans that prioritized people ages 75 and older for the vaccine before other segments of the population.
The announcement fueled a combination of confusion among seniors who aren’t as adept at using the internet to register online for appointments to get their shots. Plus, there were waits of two to three hours or more in line for the county’s vaccinations clinics at the Fresno Fairgrounds as health officials worked out the bugs in the process.
But it’s the uncertainty in the vaccine supply — and the need to ensure that second doses are available to give to people three to four weeks following their initial injection — that is creating worry for Fresno County’s health leaders.
“We’re going to run out of vaccine if our allocation doesn’t increase,” Dr. Rais Vohra, the county’s interim health officer, said Tuesday. “We’re ready for twice or three times the allocation we’re getting.”
But, Vohra added, the need and demand for vaccines are statewide, and not just limited to Fresno County or its neighboring counties.
“We were honestly afraid we were going to run out this week” before the state agreed to provide another 5,100 doses of the Moderna vaccine, Vohra added Tuesday. “Until the allocation goes up, … we are going to have to dial down our daily count from 3,000 (among the various clinics) to something less so we can do vaccinations every day.”
On Wednesday, the same supply issues forced Madera County to cancel appointments for vaccination clinics at its Social Services offices through at least the rest of this week. “We are frustrated that the supply of vaccine to our County is no where near sufficient to meet the vaccination capacity countywide,” said Jay Varney, the county administrative officer. “We remain hopeful that the supply chain issues that limit our vaccine allotment will be solved soon by the state.”
Madera County’s Department of Public Health said the canceled appointments will be rescheduled on a priority basis “as soon as the vaccine supply from the state permits..”
The California Department of Public Health reported that as of Tuesday, counties and other entities had placed orders for more than 4.1 million doses of vaccine, and about 3.5 million doses had been shipped. Of those doses sent out, a little more than 1.5 million doses had been injected into people’s arms.
In Fresno County, Vohra said that after the array of health care workers who need to be vaccinated, the next segments of the population to get their shots amount to more than 260,000 people.
That population include senior citizens, food and agriculture workers, education and childcare workers, emergency personnel including police and firefighters, the homeless, jail and prison inmates, workers in transportation and logistics, people in critical manufacturing, and industrial/commercial industries and residential/shelter constructionsectors.
It’s likely to take weeks or perhaps even months to work through those groups, Vohra said, before even larger groups of prioritized residents — and then the general public — can get their shots.
Other California regions
The central and southern San Joaquin Valley region has, as of Sunday, administered the second-fewest number of doses among the six regions in the state. The seven counties in that Valley area, with a collective population of just over 3 million people, had given a little more than 52,400 shots – or about 17 shots per 1,000 residents.
By contrast, the largest number of vaccinations have been given in the region covering Los Angeles and the central California coast to San Luis Obispo County. In that five-county region, with a population of almost 15 million, nearly 553,000 shots have been given, or about 37 per 1,000 residents.
The California Department of Public Health did not respond directly to queries from The Bee about the apparent disparities in vaccine administration from region to region.
But the state has largely aimed its allocations of vaccines toward regions with the highest numbers of doctors, nurses and other health professionals who are most directly exposed to coronavirus patients at hospitals and other medical settings. That’s one likely explanation for why the number of doses administered is far higher in Los Angeles and the Bay Area than in less-populated areas of the state.
That does not explain, however, why the least populated of the state’s six regions has a vaccination rate per 1,000 residents that is nearly double that of the Valley.
Almost 25,000 vaccine doses have been administered in California’s Region 3 – which covers the rural northern state including Butte, Colusa, Glenn, Lassen, Modoc, Plumas, Shasta, Sierra, Siskiyou, Sutter, Tehama, Trinity and Yuba counties. That’s the fewest number of doses of the six regions. But with a population of fewer than 800,000, it translates to more than 31 doses per 1,000 residents.
The state’s data does not distinguish between first and second doses, but the U.S. Centers for Disease Control reported that close to 1.2 million Californians have received one dose and about 260,000 have received both doses. Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines are two-dose regimens, taken three weeks and four weeks apart, respectively.
The CDC‘s recent update said California had administered 1,460,430 of the more than 3.5 million doses received from the federal government, through Monday. That’s 3,696 doses for every 100,000 residents, which ranks in the bottom 10 among the 50 states and D.C.
California’s administered dose total increased by about 387,000 since CDC’s previous update four days earlier, for an average of about 97,000 a day, according to federal data.
This story was originally published January 20, 2021 at 4:32 PM.
