Fresno County probably won’t reach its COVID vaccine goal by August. What’s going on?
Fresno County health officials say they aren’t getting enough COVID-19 vaccines to reach their goal of 600,000 vaccinated residents by August, delaying when the bulk of the community can return to normal life.
The county has received about 113,000 doses through Wednesday, according to Joe Prado, community health division manager for the health department. About 76,000 shots have been administered in the county, according to state numbers.
Next week’s allocation is expected to be 8,000 for Fresno County, Prado said.
The county would need to be getting upwards of 50,000 doses a week to reach the original deadline of Aug. 1, according to Prado. If that number of doses continues to be delayed, the county would need twice that to hit the mark by the end of July.
“The reality is the supply chain just isn’t there,” Prado said.
The state will be recalculating the number of vaccines coming into Fresno County out of the overall available, Prado said. The number — about 2.26% of the state vaccine inventory that comes to Fresno County — will fall to about 2.09% starting Feb. 16, because the state calculation will no longer count frontline health care workers.
“That’s something we don’t like in Fresno County. We’d like to be at that percentage or even a higher percentage of that,” Prado said. “So we’re definitely communicating with the state on our concerns with that.”
The Fresno County Fairgrounds clinic will be scheduling and giving out the second round of shots in the next few weeks. Health officials said employees have been contacting those who have had the first shot to schedule the second.
Vaccine equity
Health officials said Gaston Middle School is being set up as a hub to target African-Americans and other minority groups in south Fresno who may not be able to travel as far or be familiar with the online registration process.
The African-American Coalition is also partnering with the county to develop an outreach effort, officials said.
The San Joaquin Valley’s notoriously low number of health workers also worked against Fresno County’s allocation of vaccines, according to Rais Vohra, the interim health officer for Fresno County.
A 2017 workforce assessment by the University of California, San Francisco, found the Valley has the lowest ratios of licensed doctors of medicine, nurse practitioners and registered nurses, among other health-care professionals, in California. The number of health workers has been part of the calculation for the weekly allocation of shots.
Vohra noted that many rural communities, which are largely Latino-populated in Fresno County, also are at-risk.
He said the number of vaccines coming into the county should be taken with a “grain of salt” because the numbers track the county not by where they are distributed but where they end up.
A multi-county agency like Oakland-based Kaiser Permanente, for example, may appear to be drawing more vaccines to the Bay Area though the shots are dispersed to their hospitals in other regions.
Overall though, Vohra said, the allocations are largely being reported accurately.
“Seeing the hard numbers there really does sting, because it just confirms what we’re already feeling on the ground here that we’re not getting enough vaccines,” he said.
